Anti-Matter Belt Discovered Around Earth

hydrofix writes "A thin band of antiprotons enveloping the Earth has been spotted for the first time. The find, described in Astrophysical Journal Letters [arXiv] (Note: abstract free, full text paywalled), confirms theoretical work that predicted the Earth's magnetic field could trap antimatter. The antiprotons were spotted by the Pamela satellite launched in 2006 to study the nature of high-energy particles from the Sun and cosmic rays. Aside from confirming theoretical work that had long predicted the existence of these antimatter bands, the particles could also prove to be a novel fuel source for future spacecraft — an idea explored in a report for NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts."

Comments

antimatter

[girlintraining]

the particles could also prove to be a novel fuel source for future spacecraft

That's sooooo adorably naive! Everybody knows that if it turns out to be a useful power source, the governments of the world will compete with one another to turn it into a weapon. Space Race 2.0: Fuck The Manhattan Project, Shit Just Got Real!

Re:antimatter

[WrongSizeGlass]

That's sooooo adorably naive! Everybody knows that if it turns out to be a useful power source, the governments of the world will compete with one another to turn it into a weapon. Space Race 2.0: Fuck The Manhattan Project, Shit Just Got Real!

Talk about naive. SkyNet will use it against us while we bicker between ourselves whether or not to put the anti-matter weapons on sharks or just in the hands of evil corporations.

Re:antimatter

[PopeRatzo]

Everybody knows that if it turns out to be a useful power source, the governments of the world will compete with one another to turn it into a weapon.

Wait, you think that if the anti-matter belt around Earth turned out to be a useful power source that it would be governments that compete for control of it?

Sister, you are hopelessly naive.

Re:antimatter

[Anonymous Coward]

I do believe shit just got Anti-Real.

Re:antimatter

[Twinbee]

Or we'll be in almost peace by then, as the internet unites nations more and more. The hate on average is going down a lot, thanks to many realizing that real people exist on the other side of the globe. And the internet is a big part of that. Perhaps not so naive.

Re:antimatter

[plover]

If these could serve as fuel, you just know that every alien civilization with space travel capabilities is already harvesting these as they go. This could serve as evidence that the earth has never been visited by extra-terrestrials, or if a significant fraction of the expected particles are missing, it's possible evidence that we were once visited.

Re:antimatter

[Nick Ives]

You think the internet reduces hate? Have you seen the comments on Youtube, or even here?

Re:antimatter

[X0563511]

If weaponized antimatter was such a big draw, it would be in use by now.

Why? Because we can already manufacture it. (storage is the problem, and you'd bet your ass the Government(s) would be putting resources into solving that)

Re:antimatter

[Twinbee]

I know, hard to believe it was worse before isn't it?

Seriously, generally speaking, it's a lot harder for people to feel indifferent going to war, when they see others' lives on facebook, the web in general, or even through email.

Re:antimatter

[Anonymous Coward]

Playing an armchair scientist, I predict mass production of antimatter in no time, though down on earth, once the use of nanotechnology and doped graphene is shown to be a proven and practical method of creating and storing various antimatter particles. "Everyone" would perhaps want to make antimatter bombs or orthers for creating new thermonuclear weapon designs by switching out the fissionable material for the trigger, with antimatter. :P

Re:antimatter

[Tablizer]

Everybody knows that if it turns out to be a useful power source, the governments of the world will compete with one another to turn it into a weapon.

That's how you get research for peaceful purposes also. The ugly secret of humans is that porn and war drive many new technologies, if not most. Rather than fight it, take advantage of it.

Re:antimatter

[DakotaSmith]

They didn't find antimatter, they found anti-protons. Matter is what happens when particles arrange themselves a certain way. A few stray protons doesn't constitute matter: neither do some stray anti-protons.

Furthermore, they've found a whopping 28 of them in two years' research. Even if they'd found 28 atoms of anti-hydrogen (which would require that each anti-proton also have a positron), the amount is utterly irrelevant in terms of power generation. 28 atoms of anti-hydrogen (which I point out again that this is not) wouldn't produce a reaction capable of running a AA-battery flashlight.

I believe that the BBC has fallen victim to sensationalism and/or ignorance. It's pretty much what I've come to expect from the world press.

Re:antimatter

[sourcerror]

That hate however goes towards their own countrymen mostly.

Re:antimatter

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd need antimatter containment equipment of at least 24 millicochranes, though. Good luck with that in the 21st century, bro.

Re:antimatter

[Yvanhoe]

Also, several articles mention "billions" of anti proton around the Earth. That is still less than a joule. Bring a sugar cube into orbit, you'll have more fuel than if you captured all the anti-particles that orbit around the Earth.

Re:antimatter

[ColdWetDog]

They didn't find antimatter, they found anti-protons. Matter is what happens when particles arrange themselves a certain way. A few stray protons doesn't constitute matter: neither do some stray anti-protons.

Furthermore, they've found a whopping 28 of them in two years' research. Even if they'd found 28 atoms of anti-hydrogen (which would require that each anti-proton also have a positron), the amount is utterly irrelevant in terms of power generation. 28 atoms of anti-hydrogen (which I point out again that this is not) wouldn't produce a reaction capable of running a AA-battery flashlight.

I believe that the BBC has fallen victim to sensationalism and/or ignorance. It's pretty much what I've come to expect from the world press.

And I bet nobody invites you to parties anymore.

Killjoy.

Re:antimatter

[Anonymous Coward]

You're so naive, it's just damn cute!

We all know that if this turns out to be real, breakfast cereal companies will compete to put this stuff in tiny, edible, magnetic bottles that'll light up when you eat it! Think about the increased sales of Cocoa Puffs when they can advertise it's "amazing glowing, zapping, popping from the pure anti-matter contained in every bite!"

Re:antimatter

[cavreader]

You couldn't be more wrong. The Internet is a marvelous construct that provides many benefits but it's most prolific and growing contribution today is providing the tools to promote rampant disinformation, historical revisionism, animosity, and out right hate. There exists a sizable majority who believe everything they read on the Internet and the anonymity of the the web makes manipulating these people is easy and cheap when compared against other methods indoctrinating public opinion. And please elaborate on this increase in peace throughout the world. I can only hope your comment was intended as a troll because I have a hard time accepting someone who could be that stupid.

Re:antimatter

[wagnerrp]

I can only hope your comment was intended as a troll because I have a hard time accepting someone who could be that stupid.

Wow, you're just so hateful... :)

Re:antimatter

[Philbert de Zwart]

Sure we can manufacture it, but that costs a lot more energy than is contained in the antimatter produced, which kind of defeats the purpose.

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[plover]

I should think long-term storage isn't nearly as big a problem as battlefield delivery. You have to send the entire containment package to the target, because if the particles hit either their container or the atmosphere before arriving downrange, the bad things happen to the wrong people. That means the containment package has to withstand the G forces of launch and trajectory. It might work for a guided dropped bomb, but perhaps not a missile warhead and probably not an artillery shell.

Re:antimatter

[Scarletdown]

28 atoms of anti-hydrogen (which I point out again that this is not) wouldn't produce a reaction capable of running a AA-battery flashlight.

I believe that the BBC has fallen victim to sensationalism and/or ignorance. It's pretty much what I've come to expect from the world press.

So this discovery truly does not matter. Or does it not anitmatter in this case?

Re:antimatter

[plover]

Sure we can manufacture it, but that costs a lot more energy than is contained in the antimatter produced, which kind of defeats the purpose.

That's not really the purpose.

Think about the energy it takes to deliver a couple dozen 1,000 pound bombs to a chunk of desert: you have to make the explosives, build the bomb casings, build a jet to fly the things to whereverstan, pummel a suitable piece of ground into a landing strip, defend it with a bunch of very expensive people (including air conditioning their tents), pour tens of thousands of pounds of Jet-A into the aircraft and send it off to dodge enemy defenses, then finally drop the ordnance. Sure, most of that is reused for each weapon delivered. But the bottom line is you spend trillions of dollars and hundreds of millions of pounds of fuel to deliver a few hundred thousand pounds of explosives. "Cost effective" and "energy efficient" don't seem to be their primary design goals.

What you really want is a weapon that delivers a LOT of energy all at once to the target. Small weapons with big relative yields are preferred, so energy density is key. An atomic bomb that weighs in at less than a thousand pounds has an energy density equivalent to 20,000,000 pounds of TNT. If they didn't have the side effect of toxic radiation, they'd probably be dropping them everywhere instead of conventional munitions.

Re:antimatter

[Anonymous Coward]

2063 is in which century? Fail.

Re:antimatter

[plover]

That's how you get research for peaceful purposes also. The ugly secret of humans is that porn and war drive many new technologies, if not most. Rather than fight it, take advantage of it.

So how do you apply Rule 34 to anti-matter?

Actually, I'm pretty sure I don't want to know.

Re:antimatter

[Philbert de Zwart]

Well, I will agree with you that atomic bombs require an enormous investment, but your reasoning fails on one account: in an atomic bomb, the potential energy is already there, provided by nature. Sure we had to refine it, but in the end it is supernovas that put all that energy in the Uranium (or what have you) for us. To create an antimatter bomb, we need to produce all that potential energy ourselves, in the form of antimatter. Not only do we need to put in the potential energy itself, but also excess energy to account for the inefficiency of the production process.

That is what makes antimatter too inefficient to be used as a weapon, let alone as a fuel source.

This changes if we could harvest it from space, as indeed it would be nature again who has stored that potential energy for us.

Re:antimatter

[Anonymous Coward]

What purpose? for energy you're right. For a weapon who cares about making more energy than you spend?

Re:antimatter

[im_thatoneguy]

I remember an excellent interview a long time ago by a researcher in antimatter who was asked about weapons. His reply was 2 fold insightful:

1) Who cares, we already have tactical nukes which can fit into a brief case, how much smaller do we really need to get?

2) It's very very difficult to mix anti-matter instantaneously with a large quantity of matter. You would most likely just get a sustained very hot burn not an explosion. It's the old Fuel/Air conundrum. Per gram gasoline has more explosive power than gun powder. But you have to mix it to get it to react.

Re:antimatter

[JamesP]

They didn't find antimatter, they found anti-protons. Matter is what happens when particles arrange themselves a certain way. A few stray protons doesn't constitute matter: neither do some stray anti-protons.

Furthermore, they've found a whopping 28 of them in two years' research. Even if they'd found 28 atoms of anti-hydrogen (which would require that each anti-proton also have a positron), the amount is utterly irrelevant in terms of power generation. 28 atoms of anti-hydrogen (which I point out again that this is not) wouldn't produce a reaction capable of running a AA-battery flashlight.

I believe that the BBC has fallen victim to sensationalism and/or ignorance. It's pretty much what I've come to expect from the world press.

Thank you for trying to piss in their party, but the sensationalist/ignorant here is you.

Had you properly read TFA (or the original explanation) you would have found that
- You obviously don't know WTF is Pamela
- Pamela spent around 2% of its time in the South Atlantic Anomaly
- It detected 28 protons because that's within its capabilities (protip - particle detectors don't know an atom from an anti-atom BECAUSE IT'S NEUTRAL)
- "Protons doesn't constitute matter" What, they don't have mass? Protons fit squarely in the definition of matter, unless you are being sensationalistic or forgot the definition of matter.

And by the way, try to buy 28 antiprotons from CERN and see how much they ask for it

Re:antimatter

[VanGarrett]

There's plenty of hate on the internet, but here's the key item: It's motivated by actions and anonymity, rather than racial prejudice. More important, is that people often begin building friendships now, prior to discovering nationality.

Re:antimatter

[cowboy76Spain]

With weapons, the issue is not energy invested vs energy produced, but cost vs energy deliverable.

Probably 1000 tons of TNT are cheaper than a nuclear bomb. But you can punt 3 or 4 nuclear bombs in an ICBM that would not be capable of launching a payload of 3000 or 4000 tons, or perhaps the same amount of destructive power in submarines would amout to tripling its size.

So, it is not only a function of cost.

Re:antimatter

[JockTroll]

it's a lot harder for people to feel indifferent going to war, when they see others' lives on facebook

Facebook makes me hunger for more war. We need a "kill" button on fecesbook.

Re:antimatter

[rocket rancher]

your naivete is stunning, to say the least. you have obviously never witnessed a wikipedia edit war. or read anything posted by Matt Drudge. or looked at the Fox News website lately. the internet is a tool, nothing more, nothing less. it's like a knife, actually. A sharp edge in the hands of a surgeon is a life-saving scalpel. In the hands of a dim-wit conservative, it is a fucking blade at the throat of your civil rights.

Re:antimatter

[Troed]

we already have tactical nukes which can fit into a brief case

I'm assuming he wasn't a researcher in nuclear weapons development :) There's a huge [citation needed] around that myth (?).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suitcase_nuke

Re:antimatter

[cbiltcliffe]

"amazing glowing, zapping, popping from the pure anti-matter contained in every bite!"

That would certainly give you a kick to wake you up in the morning....

Re:antimatter

[nitehawk214]

You think the internet reduces hate? Have you seen the comments on Youtube, or even here?

Indeed, there are hate machines on the internet.

Re:antimatter

[plover]

I get what you're saying, although we seem to invest a lot of energy just to produce one high energy weapon anyway. And for fun, I'm going to pretend like this simple math counts for something.

Let's start with some values scraped off various wiki pages.
1 kWh = 3.6 megajoules.
1 kiloton of TNT == 4.184 terajoules == 4,184,000 megajoules.
Therefore a terawatt/hour is roughly comparable to a kiloton of TNT.

I'm basing the following guesses on Iran's enrichment program, which has come to light recently due to Stuxnet. The centrifuges they use spin for months refining the uranium, and the motor controllers they use are rated for delivering more than 10 kWh of electrical power, which I'll round down. They actually have over a thousand centrifuges in their array, but let's simplify that to 1,000 centrifuges == 1,000 motor controllers * 10 kWh/motor == 10,000 kWh. Refining the uranium for three months (a guess) takes 3*24*30 = 2,160 hours * 10,000 kWh, or about 21,600,000 kWh * 3.6 mJ/kWh = 77,760,000 megajoules = 78 tJ to separate an unknown quantity of weapons-grade U238. Let's guess that it's enough to make a 10 kiloton warhead. A 10 kT warhead is equivalent to 4.2 tJ/kT * 10kT, or 42 terajoules.

The simple act of separating that much uranium hexafluoride took roughly the same amount of energy than the warhead will produce. And that doesn't count any of the other energy expended, such as mining the uranium, refining the ore, transportation, construction, etc.

Are there more efficient ways to refine uranium, and are there other/better ways to produce the fissile materials, such as breeder reactors? Sure. Can these be enhanced with more of Mother Nature's finest deuterium to yield megatons instead of kilotons? Again, sure. But I'd say that until you get to hydrogen bombs, the amount of energy poured into the device and getting it there still exceeds the yields. If a government wants to blow someone up, they have proven they will expend tremendous amounts of resources to do so.

I'd love to be able to run those equivalent numbers for conventional munitions. How much energy do we spend producing TNT? I'm guessing it's many thousands of times cheaper than creating nuclear weapons, but obviously has much lower yields.

Bottom line: for a weapons manufacturer, I don't think the amount of energy put in matters nearly as much as the energy density of the warhead.

Re:antimatter

[type40]

That's how you get research for peaceful purposes also. The ugly secret of humans is that porn and war drive many new technologies, if not most. Rather than fight it, take advantage of it.

So how do you apply Rule 34 to anti-matter?

Actually, I'm pretty sure I don't want to know.

anti-proton vibrators, nuf said.

Re:antimatter

[Anonymous Coward]

2063 is in the 21st century. 0-99 AD is called the 'First Century', so the 'Second Century' starts at 100.

Talk about a fail; wow.

Re:antimatter

[Will.Woodhull]

the internet is a tool, nothing more, nothing less. it's like a knife, actually.

Actually, the Internet is more like the shovel than the knife. Without the concept of the shovel, we would still be chasing bears out of their caves to make new housing. The lowly shovel that anybody can use changed our world. So too does the Internet.

This is on topic, since the changes in the way people relate to each other that are being brought about right now by the Internet are similar to the changes that happened between people when they started bringing their new shovels to their meetings. Instead of the usual bitching, whining and moaning about how once again none of the seedlings they had so carefully planted with their digging sticks were going to survive the drought, they were doing things like discussing the best route for an irrigation ditch. Shovels changed relationships; the Internet is changing relationships.

Re:antimatter

[Anonymous Coward]

The amount of anti-matter needed to make bad stuff happen is still very miniscule. If you can establish an isolation field to contain it, it's likely that the mass being isolated wont have much inertia. Your missiles and artillery shells wouldn't have a problem if you could develop the weapons to that stage. However there are more interesting things in the works.

There are very clever people at DARPA. They're working on new things. One of those involves plasma. Supposedly they have a ball-lightning gun. It's one of those things rumored to be tested at Area 51 or Dugway. A self-contained plasma loop from which might just have the right magnetic field for containing anti-matter. In which case the speed involved on getting it to target may be in relativistic terms.

Also if production of the anti-matter doesn't have to be on the vehicle armed with it, something like an attack helicopter could have an energy weapon with adjustable firepower and very destructive capability - perhaps with the peak setting doing the kind of damage a battleship shell would. A more likely setting is one-shot one-kill on something like a tank, thus more combat time without depleting munitions.

Yes, in theory you could use anti-matter as a more extreme nuke. But in many cases it would be much more useful at much more smaller yield settings and directed to very specific targets. Usually the goal of a military is to seize and control assets, not completely obliterate them.

Re:antimatter

[Anonymous Coward]

2063 is in the 21st century.

That's the point. Whooosh!

Talk about a fail; wow.

Indeed.

Re:antimatter

[Anonymous Coward]

-1 whooosh

Re:antimatter

[dissy]

If these could serve as fuel, you just know that every alien civilization with space travel capabilities is already harvesting these as they go. This could serve as evidence that the earth has never been visited by extra-terrestrials, or if a significant fraction of the expected particles are missing, it's possible evidence that we were once visited.

That would be like BP offering a single shot glass worth of free gas, and then since no one wants to spend the $10 in gas to drive there and back to get a free $0.10 shot glass worth, then using it as proof that no one wants free gas...

Re:antimatter

[Jmc23]

you haven't seen shoveling until you've seen 2 nepalese people shoveling with only one shovel! The internet is a nice tool, but by and large still geared towards singular action. I can't wait till we see the nepalese co-operative methods take over. Imagine governments aiding other governments to reap the possible benefits of this anti-matter belt without selfish concerns of what they will take away from the endeavor.

Re:antimatter

[CrimsonAvenger]

If they didn't have the side effect of toxic radiation, they'd probably be dropping them everywhere instead of conventional munitions.

Umm, no.

The reason we don't use nukes everywhere is that there aren't really very many targets that require a 10 kt explosion to destroy.

Re:antimatter

[torune]

Oh no, Huge magnetic toroids harvesting anti-matter from orbit, which could threaten Earth with balls of anti-matter. Perhaps the UN should be working on a treaty for the peaceful use of this new international space resource.

Re:antimatter

[physburn]

Yes, but the goverments can complete for years to make a treaty for the control of it. It a take years before any useful technology can use it, Meanwhile how many antiprotons are there up there? Enough to take a kilogram payload to alpha centuar, in tens of years? Anything less is useless.

---

Space Colonization Feed

Re:antimatter

[Anonymous Coward]

Although at first I liked your comment, upon second reading I disagree.

1). This is mostly correct. However smaller with equivalent yield is always better. Remember the underground scene in Starship Troopers? If we could really produce hand-held missiles with tactical nuclear warheads, and achieve reasonable battlefield safety for the deploying troops, does anyone seriously think it would not be tempting? I mean, anti-nuclear treaties aside?

2). Fuel-Air Explosives exist and are very effective. There is a misting/dispersal phase before ignition. Specialty weapon though. Also, you are aware that all antimatter produced to date, consists of individual subatomic particles, right? They aren't solids, not liquids, not plasmas, not even gases. In short all you have to do is drop the vacuum and let the air rush in. You'll get all the mixing you need as fast as you need it.

The comments are correct in that you have to maintain antimatter containment all the way to your target. However they underestimate the problem that we have no practical way of producing or capturing enough antimatter. Even several billion particles of antimatter aren't enough for a practical explosive. There simply isn't enough power there. You'll produce the equivalent of a child's cap gun and you'll bankrupt yourself doing it.

Re:antimatter

[SomePgmr]

I absolutely agree. In even the worst case scenarios, hateful arguments get aired where others can respond with opposing viewpoints, and at least casual passers-by see both sides of any issue.

You may not change my mind when we disagree, but you might influence the opinions of some random 3rd party. If even by hammering home the notion that there can be rational parties on both sides of a disagreement and we all deserve a little respect.

Re:antimatter

[Langalf]

0-99 AD is called the 'First Century', so the 'Second Century' starts at 100.

Massive fail. There was no 0 AD or 0 BC. The calendar went from 1 BC to 1 AD. The first century was 1-100 AD. That is why the Stanley Kubrick movie was "2001: A Space Odyssey", because 2001 was the first year of the 21st Century.

Re:antimatter

[cervesaebraciator]

One might wonder if one day they will say that the internet, "by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

Re:antimatter

[Anonymous Coward]

And then we can use all our technology to put hoodrats on the moon so they will be there waiting for your grandchildren.

Aint the future grand?

Re:antimatter

[riverat1]

The antiproton belt is continuously replenished. I don't know how long it would take to replenish it if you removed all of the antiprotons but I wouldn't be surprised if it was on the order of hundreds or thousands of years.

Re:antimatter

[laejoh]

OB: http://xkcd.com/849/ :)

Re:antimatter

[silentcoder]

>and at least casual passers-by see both sides of any issue.

I can't think of anything more truly naive than to imagine that any issue has only two sides. Humans, especially politicians, like to think and act as if they did - but the real world never works that way. This makes the whole "both sides" tactic a wonderful form of mass-manipulation.

By ignoring all shades of gray you can take somebody from a reasonable position and rapidly get them to agree to a highly unreasonable proposition by painting it as being on the same side of the line - but the real world doesn't have lines. It has a huge gray area that slowly shades from "where you were comfortable with" through "less and less okay" to "not okay at all".

You start out believing people should be allowed to write and read any newspaper they like, and end up supporting the right to put the recipe for nerf gas on a billboard. You start out believing a government should be beholden to it's people, and those people empowered to replace that government - and end up supporting the idea that a convicted fellon should be able to buy assault rifles with armor piercing bullets and finger-print resistant grips.

In reality - none of us are truly on the extremes - but we end up voting for them because we've been convinced that there is a black/white line and if we don't support one extreme we support the other.
Generally though - if we truly probe our thoughts we discover that we are never really in support of the extremes. Even Timothy McVeigh thought that the right to bear arms shouldn't include nuclear weapons. Yep - a man who killed people and planted a bomb because he believed so strongly that people should be allowed to have ANY weapons, could see a kind of weapon he thought ought to be restricted.

You can really draw the same principle through almost every debate in politics today. Instead of "two sides" - look at it as two extremes with a huge gray area in the middle, and then say that each specific example in that gray area should be studied on merit and those that aren't two extreme on either side should probably be okay.

Re:antimatter

[silentcoder]

Yet, oddly, nuclear power-plants produce more energy than they use for refinement - otherwise why would we build them ?

The problem with a nuclear bomb over a reactor is simple - the bomb releases all the energy at once - and it is effectively wasted. It knocks down buildings, kills people and then dissipates into the air.

The same amount of energy carefully released slowly over a long time can run a generator with great efficiency producing far more electricity than we used to refine the fuel - and that's despite the inherent losses in electricity generation.

Which makes me doubt your conclusion, I am by no means sure that the energy the bomb releases is less than what we took to refine the fuel - since the energy was already in the fuel, we just extracted the fuel. If it was, there is no way that even the most efficient nuclear power plant could run at a profit.
It's wasted energy, but you'll be hard-pressed to convince me it's really a nett-loss.

Re:antimatter

[mwvdlee]

2 nepalese, 1 shovel... 2 girls, 1 cup... Us western people are just as good at co-operating!

On-topic; the problem with people working together is that the one selfish person usually ends up winning.
It's why all of us have to lock our doors to stop the few thiefs and why we have laws in general.

Re:antimatter

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that in the hatebook already? Fecesbook is about the showing of your excrement to your doctor. It's part of the health metabook. Metabooks are sometimes called libraries. So, we have social libraries and I just invented the concept of community library!

Re:antimatter

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, Dan Brown, isn't enough to blow out the Vatican!

Re:antimatter

[bytesex]

Why is little Johnny looking funny today ? A cornflake just fell through his head.

Re:antimatter

[Boronx]

If Plutonium fissioned at the speed of air rushing in, you wouldn't get a very big boom.

Re:antimatter

[crypticedge]

You are technically correct. The best kind of correct.

Re:antimatter

[Muad'Dave]

While likely technically correct, common usage trumps technicality. Most people regard the 1970's to be 1970-1979, etc, NOT 1971-1980. The same sort of logic applies to centuries - 20th century was 1900-1999. In fact, why don't we just declare the 1st century to be anomalous, and go on from there?

Re:antimatter

[GooberToo]

The problem with a nuclear bomb over a reactor is simple - the bomb releases all the energy at once - and it is effectively wasted

They also have an extremely poor conversion rate - typically in the single percentages, which is why they are typically very dirty. The other 91+% is just dispersed all over the place.

Re:antimatter

[pinkushun]

You are likely right @girl!

First the US blew up earth's magnetic belts with nukes in project Starfish Prime, you know... just to see if they could.

Next... the antimatter belt. I predict project name, Apocalypse.

Zombie Apocalypse if we are all lucky.

What a grandiose scheme, it can't fail!

Re:antimatter

[Twinbee]

I think there was/is a town in North America where everyone doesn't bother to lock their doors. Can't remember the name tho...

Re:antimatter

[cavreader]

And why use nuclear bombs when an orbital launched non-explosive projectile can cause the same amount of damage as a nuke without the nasty radioactive after taste? Create a projectile capable of withstanding the heat generated by entering the atmosphere and you have a powerful weapon that even the best missile defense system can not intercept it. Granted you lose the precision current missiles provide but orbital and atmospheric dynamics are well understood principles and using them direct the projectile enough can get you close enough. After all it's not like nukes or any other destructive weapon with the same capabilities need the capability to target chimneys and specific windows. The US also already has the means to launch orbit based attacks using their X-37 vehicles which are capable of achieving orbit and maneuvering.

Re:antimatter

[TheCRAIGGERS]

Sure we can manufacture it, but that costs a lot more energy than is contained in the antimatter produced, which kind of defeats the purpose.

It also costs more energy to produce a AA battery than it produces. And yet, they're in massive use, powering many devices.

Think less in terms of 'creating' energy and more in terms of energy storage / delivering.

Re:antimatter

[Anonymous Coward]

The mainstream media

is a marvelous construct that provides many benefits but it's most prolific and growing contribution today is providing the tools to promote rampant disinformation, historical revisionism, animosity, and out right hate.

There exists a sizable majority

of corporate, military and government think tanks

who believe everything they

delete

on the Internet and the anonymity

of spies and spam commentators from competitors on

the web makes manipulating these people is easy and cheap when compared against other methods indoctrinating public opinion

, such as the education system and consumer culture.

And please elaborate on this increase in peace throughout the world.

It certainly wasn't created by Facebook, although those millions of north africans and mesopotamians raging against the machine had a chance in hell of uprising by communicating using YouTube and sharing links to those evil anonymous rerouting against censorbots and such.

I can only hope your comment was intended as a troll because I have a hard time accepting someone who could be that stupid.

Given that stupidity is worse than hate? In all seriousness, dude, chick, whatever, get off your high horse. There's just as much opportunity here to correct the misinformation as there is to produce it, in fact, more opportunity than there was in the past, given that waiting for a bus is enough to be charged with inciting a riot these days and the media does more hacking than lulzsec. In fact, I just corrected some disinformation myself.

Re:antimatter

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Most people will die from starvation and extreme weather
2. The rest will attempt to run their cars on soylent green because there's no oil left anyway
3. These people will die in the energy wars, with the SkyNet bots controlling the Star Wars project out of Lucas' basement.

Anti-matter, regular matter, doesn't matter, we'll be extinct before we build the Enterprise, and SkyNet will be just another tool used in a yet another pointless dick swinging contest between sociopaths.

Re:antimatter

[Anonymous Coward]

I know, hard to believe it was worse before isn't it?

I'm from so called Gen Y and I don't know if it was worse before, because apparently queers have rights now, it's not okay to beat up women, and black folk can walk on the same side of the road as anyone else. Except that queers are still suiciding from the bullying, women are still suiciding from the rapes, and the black folk are in jail,while white men kill themselves slowly with beer, because no one anywhere has rights in practice. And those other people from those far away places, who got on those boats to migrate to safety, we'll they're being locked up as illegals and called terrorists even if they're little kids from countries the new homeland bombed in the first place. But at least we know about it. Except it's our governments that are the Mussolinis and Hitlers now, so why the fuck would they help the people they helped make poor?

So I question if anything has really changed at all, though sadly I tend to agree that this is ever slightly better than the laws that existed the day I was born, even if I can go to prison for calling the government, or pretty much anyone else who deserves it, a pack of lying fascist scum. I hope the anti-matter belt swallows up the lot of them. Fucked if I know, maybe that's what happened to Atlantis.

Re:antimatter

[jellomizer]

I would think that if the belt had enough energy to be a useful fuel source. We would have noticed problems of space craft going boom, or at least some charge that is noticed, when they hit it.

Re:antimatter

[cavreader]

Take off your tin foil hat and let your brain cool off and then maybe you will be able to make a coherent argument. Using the whole "corporate, military and government think tanks" argument is getting a little stale. And the "north Africans and Mesopotamians raging against the machine" have created nothing but more hardship for themselves while the indignant progressive westerners sit around expounding on how YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter is changing the world. These tools are good for getting info out of a country but what difference does it really make. Look at the slaughter going on in Syria or the brutal crackdowns in Iran after their last election. Exactly what good did getting this information out into the world achieve? Has it stopped the Syrians from killing anyone who even looks like they might have a grievance? Is the average Iranian comfortable with marching down the street denouncing government policies? But since you most likely live in the US or another liberal/western country you have no idea what real government repression is.

Re:antimatter

[Twinbee]

Random question time, what do you think of the 'geeks' from the IT crowd - Roy and Moss? Are they more tolerable in your eyes? :)

Re:antimatter

[treeves]

2000 *is* in the '00's, not the nineties. Nonetheless, it is also in the twentieth century, not the twenty-first century. A century is a hundred years starting whenever you decide it starts, but 'the sixties", for example are a set of years, ending in "sixty-something", so obviously 1959 or 1970 could not be a part of them.

Re:antimatter

[MikeBabcock]

... and which fall within the acceptable collateral damage specifications for the engagement.

Given forty buildings to destroy in a tight region, individual smart bombs are still preferable so as to avoid killing off the civilian population in between each.

Nuking the entire site makes no such distinction unfortunately.

Re:antimatter

[SomePgmr]

You're right of course, polarization has some serious consequences. I don't think it usually results in what you're suggesting... but it could.

But back on topic, I didn't really mean to say there are only two sides to any issue. My point was that there's real benefit to people writing out their thoughts where others can see them... even if they're arguing.

Re:antimatter

[CodeBuster]

Both the United States and the Soviet Union built relatively small warheads for tactical use during the Cold War. For example the United States deployed, for a very brief period of time, the W54 warhead on the jeep or tripod mounted recoilless launcher as the man-portable M-388 Davy Crockett. The warhead was said to have weighed around 75 pounds, so it probably could have been fit into a suitcase; albeit a rather large one. Indeed, the same warhead was also made available for use by special operations forces in the form of a satchel-charge: Special Atomic Demolition Munition. There was also a test of the W54 in an artillery shell format: Upshot Knothole Grable.

None of these weapons ever saw wide deployment for many reasons, including: (1) the weapons were almost as dangerous to their users as they were to any potential enemy because the firing forces would be subjecting themselves to the possibility of contamination by their own fallout or even their own blast effects and (2) because the weapons had to be deployed relatively close to where they were going to be used, due to short ranges, it was possible that they might be captured by the enemy and re-used against us. In the end these weapons were best described a stop-gap measures against a potential massive Soviet ground invasion until something better came along, which it did rather quickly in the form of rapidly advancing missile technology; rendering these sorts of weapons obsolete.

Re:antimatter

[silentcoder]

Now your phrasing in this version I wholeheartedly agree on.

Re:antimatter

[VanGarrett]

I see name calling, accusation and metaphor, but I don't see logic or explanation. I am having difficulty determining the validity of your argument.

Also, it is a Fascist who seeks to diminish your civil rights and a Libertarian who seeks to expand them. Conservative VS Liberal is a different axis.

Re:Navu SEAL:team killed in helicopter crash

[morgaen]

Turn off Fox News. They were obviously flying too close to the anti-matter belt.

Advances in propulsion technology

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me that we're discovering quite a lot of new things like this lately. If it keeps up, we could end up on Mars a lot sooner than we think.

Re:Advances in propulsion technology

[Midnight Thunder]

Stop being naive. The civilian research projects will all have been cut, the USA will have single A credit rating and the super rich will be paying no taxes. ;)

Hopefully it won't get that bad, but more and more it looks like it will be Russia and China getting us to Mars. The European Union may be able to make it, but it isn't really fairing much better than the USA. As for other countries, well they either don't have the budget for manned space flight or the incentive.

I want to see human space flight getting us to Mars, or even to the moon, but spacecraft need to evolve a fair bit before it becomes feasible.

Re:Advances in propulsion technology

[cavreader]

"Russia and China getting us to Mars" You have to be fucking kidding me. Russia provides simple vehicles to get into orbit and while China has announced their grandiose ambitions what have they actually done or accomplished that leads you to believe they can pass the US and other western space programs? China is sitting on a ticking time bomb right now. People continue to over estimate China's abilities and stability. Their economy has went from producing positive trade balances to deficit trade balances. They are facing stiff competition from countries like Vietnam and other emerging countries who can eliminate China's sole advantage in the world economy, labor costs. China did not gain their economic successes by providing quality or innovations. The succeeded by being able to pay their workers a dollar a day. They have already manipulated their currency to the limit trying to maintain lower export prices but that has created rapid inflation which means the Chinese citizens have to pay more for goods and services which require an increase in their income. This increase will eventually impact on the cost of Chinese exports. If the Chinese government can not mange themselves out of this situation they will be facing 3 billion angry citizens looking for some answers.

Re:Advances in propulsion technology

[silentcoder]

> If the Chinese government can not mange themselves out of this situation they will be facing 3 billion angry citizens looking for some answers.

I'm not so sure about that. The depth of Confucian philosophy in the people of China is... extreme. Their belief in an ordered state and the nation over the individual is practically unbendable and this leaves them unwilling and unable to question their government.

Go ask a chinese exchange student at your local university what he thinks of Tiananmen Square. Most likely answer: "Oh it was just some rambunctious students".
Then show them a youtube video and watch the look of absolute shock on their faces. The reason the Chinese don't criticize their government the way we do is because their entire upbringing makes the idea of questioning the government and the very suggestion that the government could be flawed unthinkable to them.

They have no difficulty doing the same thing to other governments but that's because those governments do not expound the Confucian philosophy they almost religiously cling to. And they base their complaints on that !

A friend of mine spends an English teacher who spent some time teaching in China. She told me how she once gave a class of thirteen year olds the assignment to write an essay on something they dislike.
A choice quote from one:
"I hate Ma Ying-jeou (president of Taiwan) he does not have the mandate of heaven, he just won a popularity contest".

And here's the thing - every single essay was about the same thing. When asked what they dislike most, every teenager in China cites the democratically elected president of their closest neighbor (who claims he ought to be the rule of mainland China - which is a consideration). But they don't hate him for calling himself the President of the Republic of China. They hate him for being ELECTED. They hate and despise the idea of a ruler being chosen by citizens as opposed to being chosen by God.

Their view of the party is nothing less than naked monarchism. Now monarchism in the West began to decline when the French people were hungry enough to genuinely rebel, and overcame their believe in the sanctity of monarchy enough to chop the king's head off. But they didn't have Confucianism, Christianity is a lot more favorable to questioning power (not nearly enough - but it's history has made it far more so, there was never a time when Confucianism was officially oppressed by the reigning government).

Just go back a century before the French revolution - to the first ever real rebellion in Europe, which was the peasant's revolt in Britain though. The peasant's there were revolting against the aristocratic rule, but they couldn't shake their belief in the god-given beneficence of the monarch - they put their trust in the reigning child-king Richard and honestly believed that the aristocrats who oppressed them were doing so behind his back.
They revolted against the government with the STATED AIM of restoring power to the head of that government ! The end result: Richard played along until he got them in the open, then betrayed them and had every one of the rebel leaders executed.
The peasant's revolt died an inglorious death. It did have one major impact though - it showed that farmers with flail's and pitchforks CAN give an army a run for it's money - and not long after, the French took that lesson to heart, along with the other lesson which went "if your monarchic government is corrupt, then so is the king who runs it".

All of this took hundreds of years to develop from the willing selection of monarchs as god-chosen rulers before the middle-ages though, and just a few hundred years to forget. By the early twentieth century it became almost fashionable in Europe to elect dictators who could not be un-elected and most of Europe were ruled by them soon, with the happy support of their people. Two of them (Hitler and Musolini) were particularly insane and their expansionism and joining-of-forces ultimately became world war 2.

Peopl

Fuel? No.

[ljhiller]

In 2.5 years (of which they were in the south atlantic anomaly something like 5% of the time) they found 28 antiprotons.

Re:Fuel? No.

[rubycodez]

I knew the amount had to be on that order, or we'd have noticed the gamma ray flashes of our space vehicles passing through it. Anti-matter is so very hugely energy intensive to make, we'll never use it for fuel. It's just a bad deal. We'll be using fusion for advanced space travel

Re:Fuel? No.

[rubycodez]

Those are not examples of thermodynamic law limiting something. There is a specific energy cost associated with producing an anti-proton; it is not possible to produce one without incurring that cost, else perpetual motion would be possible.

Re:Fuel? No.

[Twinbee]

But if antimatter is more compact, and we get to an efficiency point where antimatter gives off almost as much energy as it took to produce, then it's not such a bad deal.

Re:Fuel? No.

[mikkelm]

You know, most of the energy sources we use today are sources that we haven't produced. We have extracted them, combined them, or chemically altered them, precisely because of the energy costs associated with outright producing them. If there's a way to harvest anti-matter without producing it, just as we have with all of our other energy sources, then it may well become a viable energy source one day.

Re:Fuel? No.

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

So, in ten years then?

Re:Fuel? No.

[Baloroth]

Exactly. There is a reason Star Trek proposes using antimatter engines on starships. The fuel can be created on planets using massive fields of power generators, whether fusion or solar, rendering efficiency of creation relatively unimportant, and then deployed as a high-efficiency compact power source for ships. We do something similar with the RTGs in deep-space probes.

On the other hand, antimatter IIRC only releases something like ~50% of its energy in a usable manner, and even that is spread across many energy types (X-rays, heat, light, etc.) Of course, when dealing with an order of magnitude more energy total, it's still far better than nuclear.

Re:Fuel? No.

[alendit]

You are right about the Earth's belt, but wouldn't it be possible to find similar belts around bigger space objects with stonger magnetic field and 'mine' them for anti-matter? No idea, how to size of the belt scales with the strenth of the magnetic field of the object, though.

Re:Fuel? No.

[Twinbee]

Only around 10x better than nuclear? I would've thought 1000x better than fusion.

Re:Fuel? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, 28 whole anti-protons.

So if we could move CERN into orbit (impossible), capture the anti-protons (impossible), and get 28 positrons to orbit them (impossible), we might wind up with 28 whole atoms of anti-hydrogen.

Once again, the world press displays its complete scientific ignorance. This ain't even antimatter, just some anti-protons.

OK, so what you are saying is that if we put CERN into orbit, capture the anti-protons, and get 28 positrons to orbit them, we have a fully working improbability drive?

Re:Fuel? No.

[DakotaSmith]

We're getting close, yes, if you consider that each of those actions is virtually impossible -- and therefore represent some finite improbability. Consequently, all we need to do to make the Improbability Drive at this point is some calculations and a nice, hot cup of tea.

Re:Fuel? No.

[kolbe]

Jupiter has a mass of 1.8986×1027 kg, making it the largest body next to the Sun in our Solar System. So, why not take a stroll over there to see what kind of antimatter rings it has? THEN we might be able to talk about future fuel extraction (assuming we can even travel that reach on a regular basis without it taking 6 years, like it took Galileo).

Re:Fuel? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that the exact same argument "proves" that we will never power anything using lithium ion batteries? You know, there is an energy cost associated with charging the battery; it is not possible to charge it without incurring that cost, else perpetual motion would be possible. Since the lithium ion battery is not magically producing energy out of nothing, it follows that it will never serve any purpose (or something).

Re:Fuel? No.

[wagnerrp]

Anti-protons are not considered a form of matter? Do you have some prejudice against ions? Maybe you're just pissed off because anti-protons are always so negative.

Re:Fuel? No.

[brunes69]

You have to think of anti-matter more of a battery than an energy source. Once you have workable fusion (ie "unlimited", "cheap" power), the barriers to making anti-matter essentially go away. At that point you can make it and use it for space travel for what it is - a very compact energy source, which is exactly what you need for long journeys.

Re:Fuel? No.

[slashqwerty]

(assuming we can even travel that reach on a regular basis without it taking 6 years, like it took Galileo

Juno was launched two days ago and is expected to take five years to reach Jupiter.

New Horizons reached Jupiter in just over two years. If it had anti-matter fuel it probably could have stopped. If it had anti-matter fuel it would have completed the trip even faster.

Really, it doesn't matter if it takes one month or one decade as long as there are enough craft in transit at one time to maintain a steady supply.

Re:Fuel? No.

[Scarletdown]

OK, so what you are saying is that if we put CERN into orbit, capture the anti-protons, and get 28 positrons to orbit them, we have a fully working improbability drive?

And then if you go on to do 3 more impossible things that day, you can reward yourself with a nice breakfast at Milliway's.

Re:Fuel? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

We do see something: Cosmic ray visual phenomena.

Re:Fuel? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Like this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_catalyzed_nuclear_pulse_propulsion

Re:Fuel? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure there are some scientists in Batavia, Illinois at Robert Rathbun Wilson Hall who would disagree about the possibility of antimatter. Unfortunately, the Tevatron is being closed this October due to lack of funding. GHWB had something to do with that by moving the supercollider to Texas, and we all know how well THAT went. The CERN ALPHA guys currently have the record for antihydrogen storage at somewhere over 1000 seconds.

Re:Fuel? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except a battery isn't an energy source in itself, it's an energy storage device. Now if you had a way to create antimatter and an efficient (90% or better) way to recover energy from it, you'd have a permanent battery suitable for colonies. Imagine a battery rated in terawatt-hours. I could see it running a colony, a mass driver (railgun), and beamed energy for orbital vehicles (laser-ablative propulsion). Energy could be stored from nuclear batteries, solar arrays, and maybe even methane-powered internal combustion generators.

If you read Zubrin's book, The Case for Mars, you could see how a mission could be launched at around $2B/launch. Certain billionaire individuals could start it if they could be convinced to give it a go (Buffet, Gates, Pickens, etc...). The Sultan of Brunei would be more likely. He only has around $22 billion, but expensive tastes in transportation with over 7000 cars.

Re:Fuel? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said anything about making it ourselves? I doubt that the galaxy doesn't have some interesting pocket of antimatter.

Re:Fuel? No.

[physburn]

Its not so much the mass, as the magnetic fields. But Jupiter has incredible strong magnetic fields, so its reasonable to assume that it a much larger ammount of anti-protons.

---

Astrophysics Feed

Re:Fuel? No.

[rubycodez]

but the universe decided early on to be made of matter and not anti-matter, there are no one kg lumps of anti-matter waiting to be discovered.

Re:Fuel? No.

[rubycodez]

nope, To produce 100 grams of antimatter would take the current energy production of mankind for a million years. Let's say we could make 100 grams of antimatter with 1 joule, 1 watt-second of energy......do you see the free energy for nothing problem it would create?

Re:Fuel? No.

[Nimatek]

Nevermind that 'discovering' such a lump might be very unpleasant.

Re:Fuel? No.

[cavebison]

Fuel? No.

Yeah, the mention of antimatter always invokes Star Trek in the press. Apart from scarcity, there are lots of problems using antimatter for fuel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter#Fuel

Re:Fuel? No.

[silentcoder]

>You know, most of the energy sources we use today are sources that we haven't produced

Most ? Correction: all.
Basic law of physics. All the energy in the universe was already there at the big bang. We've made some of that energy do useful things, using chemical reactions and other processes to take it from some stored form of potential energy into a active energy - usually kinetic which we can then use to convert it into some other useful form (such as electric).

In the end though - every bit of energy - even the antimatter energy was there at the big bang. That produced the matter, and matter = energy. Stars collide or explode and created uranium which drives nuclear power. But they all began with simple hydrogen.

Antimatter isn't nearly as exotic as most people imagine. It's just particles with their charges reversed. An antiproton (or negatron as it's sometimes called) is just a proton with a negative electric charge. A positron is just a postively-charged electron.
Even when we "make" antimatter we're not producing anything, we're just reversing the charges - a process that takes a lot of energy to do.

Now the theory suggested that the earth's magnetic field will produce a layer of anti-protons- we've now confirmed this to be true. That's the same process of "production" - but without cost to us, it uses energy that we can't use anyway.
Much the same way that fossil fuels aren't made by us, but the energy they contain did come from somewhere -it's solar energy from a few billion years ago, stored until now. We refine the fossil fuels to burn more efficiently, but we don't produce gasoline.

The interesting thing about anti-matter is how it reacts with normal matter. A positron + a negatron produces a reaction that releases a massive amount of energy - the same energy as a nuclear-fission reaction really since it decays the particles and good old E=mc2 kicks in, but it doesn't have nearly the same problems with fall-out radiation.
This could make it very useful if we can get sufficient quantities without spending a fortune converting ordinary matter ourselves.

There is a catch however - it's very hard to store. Because anti-matter reacts with matter, it's hard to make a non-reactive container for it. In the 1930's Kurt Vonnegutt says the chemistry faculty at Harvard (where he studied) often played with the question "if you discovered a universal solvent - what would you store it in ?"

With a slight twist, antimatter brings up the same question - it's about a close to a universal solvent as we've ever gotten (among normal matter - the closest thing to a universal solvent is... surprise... water).

Re:Fuel? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Straw man alert! Who says we need 100 grams of antimatter to power our hypothetical device? Where does the 100 gram figure come from, except your own wish to conjure up an absurd number?

Try this: Start with an amount of energy needed to perform some realistic work, relevant to tasks performed by human technology. Then calculate how much antimatter would be needed to release that energy. You have now calculated a mass relevant to this discussion.

Re:Fuel? No.

[gewalker]

According to the NASA article, earth has a potential anti-proton capture of about 0.004 kg per year. Jupiter was 9 kg per year.

Re:Fuel? No.

[xtieburn]

Hang on, initial detection rates have nothing to do with the actual quantities you could later harvest. Though that can usually be extrapolated, which it has in the admittedly optimistic paper on the extraction. They measure extraction in micrograms a year depending on the body being harvested and also use the collected material in conjunction with other methods to power any project.

Now I doubt it would ever become a fuel source, Im sure other means will be ready long before we could scoop up that material, but its a fascinating idea to be considered and clearly more viable than trying to fuel something off a handful of particles every year.

Incidentally, someone suggested trying Jupiter for more material, the paper also goes in to that (If only there was some kind of acronym thats constantly posted telling us to read these things.) Turns out Saturn will have a better supply which is interesting in and of itself because it obviously doesnt have the larger magnetic field, its all a bit more complicated than that.

Re:Fuel? No.

[sznupi]

But the barriers to store it don't go away. When / if you have fusion so plentiful to contemplate producing (at inevitably immense inefficiencies) antimatter, you have most likely also fusion advanced enough to be nicely compact, etc.

(plus, the real limit of power outputs - how large and efficient you can make the radiator to dump waste heat)

Re:Fuel? No.

[sznupi]

There is a reason Star Trek proposes using antimatter engines on starships

Yes there is - it is one of of their ways to woo the audiences, about how "advanced" the depicted world is ...but in fact being largely a case of scifi cargo cultism; and contrary to many core things we've learned about our universe.

Come on - none of the starships ever having any visible (or not even mentioned in technobabble style!) heat dumps? (and there would be lots of waste heat around; the size & proportions of radiators in Avatar starship should be treated as a starting point)

Star Trek world is a tool not of space travel, but of storytelling. If anything, it tries hard to make the depicted world not too different from earthly experiences (and plots known since the times of Ancient Greece myths and theatre), to not make the audiences uncomfortable with the absolutely wild realities of actually existing universe. Limits their imagination.

In the meantime, how many of them even realise that we are already capable of sending humans while are miniaturised and in deep hibernation? Heck, give me few dozen million bucks plus one medium launcher, and I can easily transport at least thousand viable homo sapiens practically to anywhere in our system.

Re:Fuel? No.

[sznupi]

Perpetuum mobile of the 2nd kind, in other words?

(and while discussing "compact" don't forget about the infrastructure needed to actively keep, at all times, any meaningful amounts of antimatter from disintegrating the structure carrying it)

Re:Fuel? No.

[sznupi]

Particularly when approaching it in a General Products hull.

Re:Fuel? No.

[sznupi]

How about "light a single electric light bulb for a few minutes"? Answer: all antimatter CERN ever made (plus how its production has 10^-10 energy efficiency; a bit less than storing energy in Li-Ion batteries)

Re:Fuel? No.

[sznupi]

If paired with Saturn V-class launcher & NERVA upper stage, plus Russian-style "orbital" (not confined to LEO in this case of course) fission reactor & ion engine, it would also allow those probes to reach their targets much faster. And that's an essentially available tech; even such isn't used, for reasons outside of "possible / not possible" dilemmas...

By the time harvesting such antimatter belts would be maybe-who-knows feasible, the surrounding tech background is likely to be quite different; changing the rules. Heck, 'we' might as well have "magical nanotech" & mind uploading first, making the big & glorious modes of space travel known from scifi (which often shows limited imagination - to make the work of writers easier & consumption more palatable to audiences / not too dissimilar from earthly experiences) superfluous, at best.

Re:Fuel? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's your point? Even if we would accept the hypothesis that CERN is the most efficient antimatter factory that is possible to build (which it's not), the difference between 10^-10 efficiency and a lithium ion battery is still smaller than the difference between 10^-10 efficiency and rubycodez' 100 gram insanity spaz.

Re:Fuel? No.

[rubycodez]

The 100 grams is useful for a certain type of space travel. Use of antimatter for any earthly use is very inefficient. I don't think you have cottoned on to the fact that antiproton production efficiency MUST be very low, there is no way around that fact.

Planning Office

[Uncle Robert]

Has anyone checked at the planning office to see if they are planning to put in a bypass?

Re:Planning Office

[WrongSizeGlass]

Has anyone checked at the planning office to see if they are planning to put in a bypass?

Our requests for information seem to be disrupted by some as-of-yet unknown atmospheric disturbance. I'm sure they'll get back to us at their earliest convenience.

Re:Planning Office

[Yvan256]

I did. The plans were on display, but I had to go down to the basement to find them. It was in a locked Microsoft Word document, saved on a 360 KB floppy disk, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Ponies".

Re:Planning Office

[Midnight Thunder]

I tried finding out and it turns out the intergalactic freedom of information act excludes beings that are not part of the council. Then again maybe it was something along the lines that they were out to lunch? My intergalactic translator was marked "as seen on TV", so I should be careful about it's use for diplomatic purposes.

Re:Planning Office

[DakotaSmith]

I've been trying to contact the Planning Office at Alpha Centauri without any success. Apparently the sub-ether network employs a protocol other than TCP/IP. I'm beginning to suspect that the system isn't even based on binary.

Re:Planning Office

[Anonymous Coward]

And that was in Arther Dent's sandwich, which was annihilated when the mice checked out.

Re:Planning Office

[SlashV]

Ever thought of going into advertising?

oh ho ho ho

[rdpratt]

FUEL?! FUCK YEAH FUND IT. But screw that James Webb bullshit they've got going on. Useless.

arXiv is not paywalled

[Anonymous Coward]

that's the point!

Anti-Matter

[cob666]

In other news. General Products press conferences states that visiting Earth could void the warranty on your GP hull.

Re:Anti-Matter

[DakotaSmith]

I dunno, I'd chance it given the fact that what they've found wouldn't even make one Nickel atom. Those tanj Puppeteers are doing the usual corporate spin so as to avoid paying out the indemnity.

Re:Anti-Matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Niven reference, move along.

Re:Anti-Matter

[Anonymous Coward]

So that's the real reason the puppeteers went missing and stopped visiting earth.

Re:Anti-Matter

[Anonymous Coward]

That was the first thing this reminded me off as well.

Re:Anti-Matter

[Agripa]

What part of "do not advertise this" is beyond your puny comprehension? - Hindmost

Preemptive strike

[roman_mir]

Oh, no, bring W. Bush back, we need to strike into this new enemy's lair before it attacks the American way of life (and also these may be used to power up SUVs somehow, GM, GE, Boeing and Lockheed Martin should look into this right now.)

I knew it

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew the moon landing was a hoax, and here is the proof.

Re:I knew it

[MightyMartian]

Proof of what. The density is very low. It poses no risk to transiting spacecraft.

You missed the obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Commodore Decker's "Planet Killer".

Decker: "We saw this thing hovering over the planet, slicing out chunks of it with a... force beam."

Kirk: "Did you run a scanner check on it? What kind of a beam?"

Decker: "Pure... antiproton. *Absolutely pure*!"

Moon landing hoax confirmed!

[Anonymous Coward]

Moon landing conspiracy buffs got a shot in the arm today when it was found the Earth is surrounded by antimatter. Many of the conspiracy theory buffs being Star Trek scholars realized any ship passing through it would explode confirming their belief that we never went to the Moon. Actual scientists pointed out the low density of the particle band but they were unswayed and hope one day that the information can help disprove the evolution hoax as well.

Re:Navu SEAL:team killed in helicopter crash

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that makes the score 22-1 in their favor.

no it's moving to non government space flight

[Joe_Dragon]

no it's moving to non government space flight.

Any way I will hate to see a cheap / corner cut china space ship fall apart mid way to mars. china 3 gorges dam may fail in real big way soon.

Not much more efficient than fusion

[tp1024]

Even if there were huge quantities of anti-matter (implying that the spacecraft would have been vaporized in a short bright flash of light) and we could store it somehow (ignoring the safety implications of the storage failing) and in any way efficiently convert the resulting hard gamma radiation into anything useful at all, pure anti-matter still only has about 1000 times the energy density of fission fuel and about 100 times that of fuel for nuclear fusion. (Compare that to a factor of about 10 million between chemical and nuclear fuel.)

No, not even anti-matter will be able to do miracles.

Re:Not much more efficient than fusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Well as you should know. First you have to channel the mater - antimatter reaction though the dilithium crystal matrix. Then you can use it to power your warp field. Then you get your miracles.....

 

Re:Not much more efficient than fusion

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

actually, the dilithium is only a regulator for the reaction. It doesn't change the nature of the energy release into being "warp fields" at all - the warp coils do that. IIRC Dilithium crystals are either transparent or reflective to anti-hydrogen when stimulated, allowing precise amounts of antimatter to be combined with normal matter as part of a stable reaction process. /from the star trek technical manual I read 20 years ago

Yeah so

[h4x0t]

We found this thin layer of stuff enveloping our planet, haven't confirmed it envelops the other desolate planets in the neighborhood, don't have good predictions as to what it actually does there... and we want to talk about harvesting it for fuel?
Go team go.

Anti-matter suspenders

[clyde_cadiddlehopper]

In a related story, the Department of Redundancy Department has announced funding for a new project to confirm the existence of the Earth's antimatter suspenders. A spokesman for the department explained that current theory requires both to exist. A second spokesman for the department explained both must exist, according to current theory.

Re:Reality Check

[Anonymous Coward]

Hm, you seem to be stupid. Is that a problem for you in everyday life? I mean, when you go to the hospital to get a PET scan, do you unleash your ignorance on the staff? Do they punch you in the eyes with icepicks like they should? If they don't, I will.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron%E2%80%93positron_annihilation

Or I've been trolled by a superlative master. In which case, teach me?

Send Out More Harvesters!

[tunapez]

We must gobble it up and hoard as much as soon as possible! We don't know what we'll do with it all we just know we need more. HURRY!

Re:Send Out More Harvesters!

[Anonymous Coward]

If we are not careful the space worms come and eat our harvesters before our carryalls arrive. One has to deploy scouts to detect the worm signs.

So it's DOCTOR Bruno now!

[93 Escort Wagon]

Good job, dude! I was wondering what you'd been up to since your work in Dr. Tongue's 3D House of Stewardesses!

So, you mean ...

[Anonymous Coward]

the particles could also prove to be a novel fuel source for future spacecraft

Translation: You, for one, welcome our new antimatter overlayer!

(Sorry, folks, but the meme was just screaming for use in this discussion. It was, in fact, a screaming meme).

Re:So, you mean ...

[Scarletdown]

the particles could also prove to be a novel fuel source for future spacecraft

Translation: You, for one, welcome our new antimatter overlayer!

(Sorry, folks, but the meme was just screaming for use in this discussion. It was, in fact, a screaming meme).

Golf Clap (x2)

one for the clever twist on the meme, and one for the metameme at the end.

Take a look

[Dunbal]

at the names of the scientists who published the article. Notice something?

Re:Take a look

[Anonymous Coward]

They're all either Italian or russian (with the exceptions of Dr. Wu and Dr. Bruno).

What are you trying to say?

Re:Take a look

[wagnerrp]

They're all named John!

Re:Take a look

[Anonymous Coward]

About two-thirds of them are Italian?

Re:Take a look

[Anonymous Coward]

That they are all mostly Russian and Italian? That's who the PAMELA group is mostly composed of. Doesn't seem strange to me that the names of the article publishers would be those who run the equipment.

Mining Jupiter and Saturn for antiprotons

[msheekhah]

You know we're gonna do it.

Not paywalled

[History's Coming To]

Unless the summary is talking about the journal instead of the arXiv article it's not paywalled, I don't think I've ever seen anything on arXiv that is. It's kind of the point. Anyway, if you can't be bothered looking for the PDF link (top right) this will take you straight to the paper.

Re:Not paywalled

[blueg3]

There's no such thing as a paywall on arXiv -- you submit full preprints to it, and paywalling isn't an option. That is the point. :-)

Warp speed Mr. Scott!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now all we need is a method to contain that anti-matter that doesn't result in matter coming into contact with it. ;-)

Re:Reality Check

[Tanuki64]

You are aware that anti-protons and protons just like anti-electrons and electrons have opposite charges? And what do opposite charges?

GOTO page 54

[roger_pasky]

Nice NASA IAC document. You can avoid Sheldon-level buzz wording going directly to page 54 where average Howard Wolowitz engineers can understand a great summary.

Re:Reality Check

[Tanuki64]

You get a reaction -- if you can get them to collide. You still need a linear accelerator to do it.

You need an accelerator to get two protons to collide. Two protons have a positive charge, so they repel each other. The acceleration is necessary to overcome this repellent force. Between a proton and an anti-proton there is no repellent force. They actually attract each other.

There is absolutely no open question when it comes to matter/anti-matter annihilation. It has been done with anti-hydrogen and container walls more than once.

Re:Reality Check

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless I'm mistaken, an anti-proton would also qualify as an anti-hydrogen ion yes?

Re:Reality Check

[Caraig]

The only problem though is getting them to collide. While the OP is dramatically off the mark in a lot of areas, they are relatively correct in the need for acellerated streams being needed to cause particle collisions.

A microscopic chunk of antimatter in Earth's atmosphere, however, is something else entirely. It WILL get smacked with molecular collisions. (It is not likely to 'explode' so much as 'boil' though) For this reason, I do not recommend that OP inhale a balloon full of antihydrogen. Hydrogen is toxic and does obscene things to certain gases found in the lungs; antihydrogen can't be any better. The trick, of course, is getting a microscopic chunk of antimatter. Penning traps have only been able to capture individual small amounts for only a short time, on the order of seconds, maybe minutes. Definitely not enough to use for chemical experiments with antimatter a possibility.

But beyond that, can you imagine positron shells trying to interact with electron shells? What a covalent bond between 2 antihydrogen and 1 oxygen might be like? I can't; it probably can't happen, but I'm pretty sure that it would not be good if it could; Uncle Heisenberg is crying himself to sleep in Neils Bohr's arms thinking about it. OP's lungs would get a nice dose of gamma radiation, and he would most certainly NOT turn into the Hulk. I would imagine he wouldn't die from cancer, however; his lungs would be charred into coal from the heat generated by the thermal effects of dumping that much gammas into the residual gasses in his lungs and the cellular walls. (Oh, hey, OP, by the way: All that antihydrogen would NOT be expelled in the next breath, unless you can somehow turn your lungs inside out. This is partly why inhaled corrosives are so nasty: They linger. Coughing won't get them out entirely. The most you can hope for is that they dilute quickly in normal atmosphere and don't do something even worse like bond with molecular gates in the cells of your alveoli.)

Also... WTF? What does this have to do with AGW?

It is not true ...

[chessweb]

... that the full text is not available on arXiv.

Re:Reality Check

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, the matter label is really applied to anything which is a fermion. So a positron is considered anti-matter as well as an anti-proton. Doesnt need to be in a bound state.

And trust me, we damn well know that matter and anti-matter annihilate. This has been observed countless times in countless experiments. See recent CERN press releases about storing anti-hydrogen. Why can they only store for a short time, its because it annihilates when it touches matter.

The Belt...

[Heed00]

It holds the tachyon pants up.

antiparticles!?

[angiasaa]

If there were enough antiprotons out there to be useful as a fuel-source, any probes sent through would have come out the other side shredded to the chips. Or am I still theorizing shit?

Tiger, 'dat you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Golf Clap (x2)

A friend of mine once had Golf Clap as the result of a hole in one. He said it affected his putter and his balls. No more careless swinging for him...

-------------

[Lays down gauntlet ...]

Re:Tiger, 'dat you?

[Anonymous Coward]

dannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng

not following that one.

OMG

[dutchwhizzman]

PONIES!!!!!1!!11!

Send Commander Montgomery Scott

[p51d007]

To collect them to energize the anti-matter containment field so we can get the h*ll out of here!

Finally!

[elguavas]

...something to hold up my antimatter pants.

What I find interesting...

[LynnwoodRooster]

It's not so much that we found anti-protons - that can be expected. It's that they were apparently trapped with such a weak magnetic field as the Earth's.

Re:What I find interesting...

[ThorGod]

The trick may be that it is big, large, and in a vacuum (relatively).

Just a wild guess.

Antimatter around Jupiter?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, does this imply there should be a lot of antimatter around Jupiter?

Re:Reality Check

[Anonymous Coward]

This post seems to have quite a bit of wrong about physics. Anti-protons is a form of antimatter, the term "antimatter" is not specific to full anti-atoms, and is probably used 99% of the time to refer to things that are not anti-atoms. Anti-protons wouldn't be formed by nuclear reactions as it is well above the energy involved, although there are nuclear reactions that produce positrons. Natural sources of anti-protons would mostly be cosmic rays and the interaction of cosmic rays with matter around the planet.

Saying there is no empirical evidence to support matter and anti-matter annihilation is really far off the mark. There are several aspects of it that you can study in an undergraduate nuclear physics lab course, or even in detail in a senior level course. The fact that individual particles are charged means they will quickly stop when penetrating matter and then be attracted to their oppositely charged anti-particle. It doesn't take accelerators or any precision. A lot of the basic principles in those low level lab courses are tested just using a sodium-22 source which produces a rather random distribution of positrons that then annihilate with just a brick of lead or other material depending on what is being looked at.

This is not only not sci-fi, it is not even limited to the domain of pure research. Antimatter has actual applications like use in positron emission tomography, a type of medical imaging.

Fuel,well maybe...

[fliner03]

hmm, 28 particles in three years, maybe not. That pretty much misrepresents the full article.

From section 4:
"The factor of proportionality between the antiproton flux and the number of detected antiproton
candidates, corrected for selection efficiencies and acquisition time, is by definition the gathering
power of the apparatus.

The apparatus gathering power was calculated to be significantly
reduced with respect to the geometric factor (http://pamela.roma2.infn.it/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=256

The actual PAMELA instrument is fairly small(roughly 1.3 m x .5m) and has esentially no intake manifold.

From section 5:
During about 850 days of data acquisition (from 2006 July to 2008 December), 28 trapped
antiprotons were identified within the kinetic energy range 60–750 MeV. Events with geomagnetic
McIlwain coordinates (McIlwain 1961) in the range 1.1 L 1.3 and B 0.216 G were selected,
corresponding to the SAA. The fractional livetime spent by PAMELA in this region amounts to
the 1.7% ( 4.6 109 s).

My understanding is that that 850 days is time live for the instrument and 1.7% is percent of time in the SAA at geomagnetic ranges of interest. Right? So, 4.6X10^9 seconds works out to about 145 years. 1.7% of 850 days is 14.25 days. Quite a discreapency. Can someone else shed light?

So, you have an instrument with a very small physical intake and no collection system. Limited time at the target site as well. Given these factors, I would have to imagine that a larger more complex system could collect meaningful volumes. Might want to give that Buzzard ram scoop idea a second look.

The paper from Draper:
I like their estimations of collection rates. There should have been better treatment of power requirements vs. yeilds of the system. And, they at least could have given a nod to the Sci-Fi popularization of the same idea.

Now, lets wait too see some realistic propulsion system concepts.

Start collecting

[xaoslaad]

So, I think we should start looking at sending a satellite or satellites to collect anti-matter; I don't know if we have the ability to create a magnetic field powerful enough and long enough to do this, but if not we should be figuring it out. I would say don't even bother bringing it back to earth either. When we're ready to do something with it, get the ship into space, whether we launch it, or build it up there, and have it collect the satellite like a stop at the local gas station before heading out.... just my thought on the whole idea. I'm guessing we're a ways off from considering something like this, but having a viable source nearby does get the imagination going.

Re:Reality Check

[Anonymous Coward]

The retardation is amazingly strong in this thread. Like... enough to surprise me even considering the normal Slashdot retardation.

Clearly this site has lost its mojo.

Mod Parent up

[rossdee]

Yeah, I was telling everyone that at the end of 1999 when they had that big celebration, Nobody listened then either.

Re:Reality Check

[silentcoder]

> the subatomic particles will not collide.

That's just wrong.

And your own analogy explains why.
In your analogy - the star from the milky way headed toward the Magellan system has gravity, so do the stars in Magellan. Gravity is an attactive force (or to be Einsteinian, the bend it produces in space-time curves TOWARD the sources) which improves the odds of a collision. It doesn't have to be on-target, if it's just close enough to one, it will curve round and strike it.
Electric charges can be both attractive and repulsive depending on which combination you have.
Now if you inhaled pure anti-protons you could almost guarantee it couldn't collide, because your lungs do NOT produce that much force. Anti-protons have the same charge as the electrons surrounding normal matter in your body - so they'll repulse each other and your odds of a collision is zero. There's nowhere near enough force to produce a collision.

But Anti-hydrogen is a different matter, it's got a positron on the outside. That means it has a positive charge, while normal matter have their negative charges on the outside. That means it will be attracted to the matter in your body.
It doesn't have to be aimed at it, it gets attracted to it. We KNOW those attractions work, because they happen ALL THE TIME.
Every chemical reaction in the world, every compound molecule has it's origins in the electric attraction between opposite charges in particles.
The rules are slightly different when it's matter+matter since their outside charges are actually repulsive, but the way electrons work they can share orbits etc. etc. which is why it all works - ultimately it happens because the electrons of one atom are attracted to the protons in another.
If anything... antimatter/matter collisions are MORE likely than ordinary chemical reactions because they don't depend on the opposing/spin rule, the positrons around anti-hydrogen are directly attracted to the electrons around normal hydrogen (for simplicity think hydrogen but the same goes for heavier elements and indeed compounds) and they will actively RUSH into collision.

Positrons emtering the orbit of electrons are not going to peacefully share it like another electron would...

How far away?

[Anonymous Coward]

How far away from earth's surface is this belt?

Re:Reality Check

[hxnwix]

Again, as I understand it, the annihilation occurs when particles actually collide. That's actually much harder to accomplish than it sounds like.

At STP, how many times per second on average does a single molecule of O2 collide with other O2 molecules in pure O2 gas?

Yes, that's right, a fucking shit god damn epic ass-ton of times. On the order of 5x10^11. So, you bloody idiot, there are plenty of opportunities for a single atom or molecule of antimatter to be annihilated.

How many different people have to explain this to you before it begins to permeate your thick fucking head?!

Fun Facts

[splashbot]

"Artificially generating antiprotons in magnetospheres (natural or otherwise) would be very valuable and efficient. By effectively locating the particle accelerator within the magnetic ‘bubble’, the system can produce and trap antiparticles within high efficiency which can then be used for propulsion. Leveraging the development of a space qualified nuclear reactor (Project Prometheus) or 100 kWe solar array would enable ~10+ gm to be collected in orbit per year." J Bickford. From the article. Now the ISS has a power output of 83.6kW, if it could be put into an orbit to microwave transmit energy to the Antimatter generator in polar orbit this would be very adventageous. Assuming 100kW is available, The Deep Space 1 probe ion thruster had a power consumption of 2.3kW, this Antimatter Fuel Depot would be enough to power the thruster for 12 years for 1 year's worth of production (assuming 100% efficiency), if you had 80% efficiency, you could power the spacecraft for ~10 years. We could field 10 probes a year, or collect 5 years worth for a manned mission to Titan, or Mars. Never mind putting a reactor into orbit, we have the basic tool already.

Before we go harvesting it...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll file this under "Things we shouldn't mess with too much for the sake of our atmosphere"

At least until we know what the consequences would be.

Re:Navu SEAL:team killed in helicopter crash

[GameboyRMH]

I just read that there were 38 people on board (including 19 Navy SEALS) so I don't know where those numbers came from.

Output

[JimThink]

With "worldwide output in the nanogram range", I'd do the rocket motor research here before investing in Van Allen belt farming. The papaer estimates, at best, 15 nanograms in the entire region!?!? Even with 100% efficient harvesting, and the most rosy estimate of content, we are talking 15 nanograms.

While it may be a "concept", practicality is so far away we may want to work on ESP or try deep mining for dilithium crystals first.

"Based on this and the subtraction of the solar proton contribution, the antiproton content of the Earth’s magnetosphere from this effect is estimated to be between 0.15 and 15 nanograms. This is replenished every few years."

Would Jupiter have more?

[Tekfactory]

Jupiter's Magnetic field is supposed to be much bigger and more intense than Earth's, would it have more?

Could we use it and Saturn as some kind of anti-matter fuel depot?