Antimatter is one of the costliest materials in the world. Supposing we had one antimatter bomb (it has to be detonated in one particular location, but it can be as big as necessary, even as big as an entire city), how much antimatter would we need in order to eradicate all animals on Earth? The cost of creating antimatter like this makes it the world's most expensive substance. "Even in that hypothesis you'd still need a gram of antimatter, which would take 10 billion years to accumulate," Professor Doser says. Safety, Health & Environmental Affairs Committee, Transportation, Distribution & Security Committee. Indeed this is a polar-explosion (1 gamma to one side and the other to opposite side). A much smaller amount embedded near the heart could of course kill you but the grenade-sized amount insures fairly well you won't survive--particularly if it is applied all at once directly to the body. In John Barnes' excellent Thousand Cultures series, the ultimate nasty weapon is the teleportation of antimatter into the atmosphere as a very fine dust spread over a large volume. Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings. A boy can regenerate, so demons eat him for years. In our case, we're taking the mass of earth plus the mass of the antimatter planet. Such weapons would easy eclipse nuclear weapons in power, e.g., 1 gram of antimatter would equal 23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy. Stack Exchange network consists of 181 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. In order to store antimatter it has to be kept in a sealed container and held up with magnets so that it floats. The worlds most powerful nuke ever created was the Tsar Bomba. How explosive is Antimatter, Really? : r/AskPhysics - Reddit Why do you say "pure gamma"? I went to wolframalpha.com, and typed in this. Indiana Jones level kill you immediately radiation dosage is about 100000 rads, so that's about 290,000 kg of antiprotons spread out evenly. Antimatter: how the worlds most expensive and explosive substance is made, Catch up with The Loop, your quick wrap of this morning's news. Now, if we were sloppy, we would just pepper the land area of $148,300,000 km^2$, so about 1,236 MIEVs (Multiple Independently Targetable Entry Vehicles) with 100 2kg warheads each would do. The blast radius follows Hopkinson-Cranz Law which states that identical explosives with the same geometry but different sizes and distances will produce self-similar blast waves in the same atmosphere. The damage done to the biosphere here is more due to pressure and heat than radioactivity. This sounds like a good thing at first, but it just means that antimatter weapons could be seen as more politically acceptable, and therefore more likely to be used in warfare. What's the cheapest way to buy out a sibling's share of our parents house if I have no cash and want to pay less than the appraised value? Or would it be similar to a Fat Man Bomb? "We actually expect that the whole Universe since there was lots of energy around at the moment of the Big Bang should consist of equal amounts of matter and antimatter," Professor Doser says. So far, all the antimatter created in all the particle accelerators on Earth wouldn't be enough to boil a cup of water. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. For Starship, using B9 and later, how will separation work if the Hydrualic Power Units are no longer needed for the TVC System? How many thermonuclear bombs needed to make a hole from the surface to the Mantle of a planet that is the same size as planet Earth? [4] As such, Hui Chen of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory dismissed concerns about antimatter bombs in 2008 as "unrealistic". Is it possible to transform energy stored in anti-matter into coherent radiation? This calculation helps us in finding the pressure loads on objects. Divide the energy put out by this annihilation and we get $\Delta K = 14000$. The main hurdles are the production and storage of large amounts of antimatter. The problem lies in the efficiency and cost of antimatter production and storage. Would it be imperceptible? (Some say that this was adapted into the show based on people who knew Miguel Alcubierre and they put his unpunished theories into the show, but I don't think this was ever confirmed), But there are volumes of Star Trek Tech manuals that base other things "kind of" around science, or at least attempt to, like the Heisenberg Compensation in the Transporters. Are Neutrons and anti-Neutrons attracted to each other over distance? Both antimatter and matter were created after the big bang, and the universe should be made up of 50% matter, and 50% antimatter. It basically all reacts at once release an enormous amount if IR -- enough to melt any rock within sight -- followed by a blast wave. You can crash 10km sized asteroids into it, and there'll still be some survivors to whine about the injustice of it all. The explosive energy of a quantity of TNT of the. achieving the specified result. If antimatter makes contact with air it will cause an explosion. What if I had 1 anti-hydrogen atom or enough antimatter that's equal in "weight" to a hydrogen atom? 7g divided 7 bn ways would equate to about the equivalent of 40 grams of TNT per person, something like a small hand grenade each. Anti Matter Energy Calculator. A Tsar Bomb? 2014 The Institute of Makers of Explosives. But I mean, I'm leaning towards Star Trek being somewhat more accurate, they gloss over how Warp Drive works in the Original Series, but by the time The Next Generation came about in 1987 they explained how Warp Drive works, and then we had a working theory on the Alcubierre Drive by 1994. radiation - Antimatter bomb - Physics Stack Exchange So in this Big Bang scenario, particles and antiparticles would have been coming into existence and then annihilating one another in equal measure. This blast radius calculator helps you determine the distance for detonations, after which there would be no fragments. TBX (thermobaric explosives) or EBX (enhanced blast explosives), in a small, confined space, may have over twice the power of destruction. Big Bang scientists have long claimed that some unknown physics somehow allowed a slightly greater amount of primordial normal matter to be produced, and this leftover normal matter eventually became the material stuff of the universe. Supposing we had many thousands of antimatter bombs (they can be detonated in many different locations), how much total antimatter would we need in order to wipe out all humans on Earth? So, what's their working theory as to why our evil antimatter twins didn't just cancel everything out, long ago? CAUTION The total power of aluminized mixtures strictly depends on the condition of explosions. And for my Trekkie friends out there, that also means fusion-poweredwarp driveslike those on Star Trek ships are unlikely to be a thing any time soon. Note It is convention to use ton compared to short ton, net ton American or tonne (1000 kilogrammes.) To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader. Ah yes, the multi-million dollar question. They did it by creating a magnetic bottle called a Minimum Magnetic Field Trap. by Weaselmancer ( 533834 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @04:06PM ( #10432675 ) The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that the Air Force is actively pursuing antimatter weapons. In all honesty you can probably get away with less because the force of the explosion will likely kill many humans. Which ability is most related to insanity: Wisdom, Charisma, Constitution, or Intelligence? A block in a city? Lowest tech level to blow up the solar system, Counting and finding real solutions of an equation, A boy can regenerate, so demons eat him for years. Electron + positron = 2 * gamma going opposite directions and having nearly the same energy of electron + positron mass-energies. This amazing device creates a region of space where the magnetic field gets larger in all directions. The gammas then scatter of air molecules, transferring the energy into heat. Cookie Notice 1 megaton is about 4.2x10 15 J. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top, Not the answer you're looking for? Answer (1 of 3): What would happen if we detonated an antimatter bomb on Earth? But even this is insanely expensive for only one bullet. But it's really not that big of an explosion. So if correct the answer would answer question number 3, but questions number 1 and 2 are left unanswered. This is not the first time Big Bang thinking has led to the conclusion that the universe shouldnt exist. Here they create and capture this bizarre anti-stuff. Such a wave can be catastrophic depending upon its intensity. Browse other questions tagged, Start here for a quick overview of the site, Detailed answers to any questions you might have, Discuss the workings and policies of this site. Privacy Policy. There is no nuclear bomb that comes close to the power this bomb would have. Answer (1 of 6): Let's assume a gram of antihydrogen, which would release about 2 GeV per annihilation. Professor Doser leads a team studying this strange, expensive, explosive stuffin the wonderfully named Antimatter Factory. What are the arguments for/against anonymous authorship of the Gospels, Weighted sum of two random variables ranked by first order stochastic dominance. Right now, antimatter - with a price tag of about $62.5 trillion per gram - is the most expensive substance on the Earth. There are many ways to calculate "TNT equivalence" and the term is often misused because the property in question and basis for the equivalence are not defined. which is equivalent to How does that last equation (rolled back for the time being; see revision history) work out? Antimatter annihilation from anti-hydrogen is surprisingly messy: it will not be pure gamma rays. Matter-antimatter annihilation from a hypothetical macroscopic explosion would produce the same particles as proton-antiproton annihilation in microscopic quantities in accelerator experiments. The RE factor is the relative mass of TNT to which an explosive is equivalent: The greater the RE, the more powerful the explosive. The universe began to cool and then expand. The Truth about Angels, Demons and Antimatter | Live Science "The best explanation that we have found up to now is to say that there's a slight difference in the properties of particles and antiparticles,"Professor Doser says. Total solar output in all directions per day. But antimatter is incredibly scarce, and scientists still dont know why. Such an asteroid would boil away the oceans and transform the atmosphere into one of steam and molten rock." Where can I find a clear diagram of the SPECK algorithm? Sorry, but I don't know where you can get the text of this book online. The best chemical rockets, like NASA's Space Shuttle main engine, max out at around 450 seconds, which means a pound of fuel will produce a pound of thrust for 450 seconds. I have no idea how to get that in an antimatter bomb, because of the fizzle problem noted above. For a fragmenting munition where public access is possible, the TNT explosion radius, DDD, is: This distance is different for the bare explosives. If you have an absurdly large fireball it will tend to spread more upwards (less pressure, longer mean-free path) and send a big plasma cloud up - bad from an electromagnetic pulse, ozone layer and IR energy igniting stuff perspective. Why 1.810 14 joules? In fact you would need 2.5 trillion tons of antimatter. - Georg Patscheider Nov 30, 2018 at 14:03 rev2023.5.1.43405. This is one of the more common types of "TNT equivalence" and is the one used on USGS form 9-4040A. However for only $600,000 you could fit a 10 millionth of a gram of antimatter into a snipers bullet. Antimatter: Most Expensive Substance on Earth - Science to go $361,000,000 km^2$ to cover, you'd need another 3,009 MIEVs. Given that 1 ton is equal to 2240 pounds or 1016.046909 kg we should be able to scale up the explosive yield simply. 1 gram of antimatter explosion radius. An explosive, upon detonation, releases a large amount of energy. Embedded hyperlinks in a thesis or research paper. However, the mean free path is so short at ambient pressure that they will react before going far (doing it in the upper atmosphere might produce a much larger and fuzzier fireball). All of the other answers here are super overkill for this. thanks for the detailed answer! The antihydrogen gets stuck in the area with the weakest magnetic field. No country has considered it worth it to make one, and even the richest businessmen in the world dont have the funds to build one. The solar irradiance on Earth every second. How much energy is released? - Worldbuilding Stack Exchange Calculating a single RE factor for an explosive is, however, impossible. Has the cause of a rocket failure ever been mis-identified, such that another launch failed due to the same problem? We could make this happen if we work at it. The team is called the ALPHA collaboration. As we learned in real estate, location, location, location. So 1 mg 18F-FDG will produce about ~10^15 times as much annihilation energy as a single anti-proton (these are just rough estimates to get a feel for the magnitudes involved). To create antimatter you just need to create matter. @Serban Tanasa: No, it's clearly not the same question. In other words, for each gram of TNT exploded, 4.184 kilojoules (or 4184 joules) of energy are released. All of the antiprotons created at Fermilab's Tevatron particle accelerator add up to only 15 nanograms. WAY too much. In other words, beyond this distance, one can assume there would be fewer or no fragments flying. The time of interaction is very short. ", National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, "How much energy does an earthquake release? "Antimatter appears every single time matter appears," Professor Doser says. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top, Not the answer you're looking for? How Antimatter Spacecraft Will Work | HowStuffWorks This equivalency is most famously described in Einstein's equation: e (energy) = m (the mass of matter) xc (the speed of light) squared. Did the Golden Gate Bridge 'flatten' under the weight of 300,000 people in 1987? Antimatter is just like normal matter, except that some of its properties are opposite that of normal matter. Antimatter: how the world's most expensive and explosive - ABC When a bit of matter comes into contact with its evil antimatter twin, they cancel each other out, releasing all the energy stored inside them. It's also likely the most explosive substance on the planet. The energy liberated by one gram of TNT was arbitrarily defined as a matter of convention to be 4184J,[12] which is exactly one kilocalorie. A gram of antimatter could produce an explosion the size of a nuclear bomb. ", "Beirut Explosion: What Happened in Lebanon and Everything Else You Need to Know", "Preliminary yield estimation of the 2020 Beirut explosion using video footage from social media", "Seismic Experiments on the North German Explosions, 1946 to 1947", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, "Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Long Term Health Effects", "Kinetic Energy of Tornadoes in the United States", "Frequently Asked Questions Electricity", "Country Comparison:: Electricity consumption", "NOAA FAQ: How much energy does a hurricane release? But I don't know how to calculate that. Crash it into an iridium block. Can antimatter projectiles work as disintegration weapons? explosions - Putting grams of antimatter in the atmosphere - Physics The energy output that would be released by a typical, The approximate radiated surface energy released in a magnitude 8, The complete conversion of 1kg of matter into pure energy would yield. Interaction with the blast wave can cause severe injuries (see injury severity score calculator) depending on the stand-off distance. If you wanted to capture antihydrogen without it getting annihilated, then you would have to use something called a loffe trap. ", "Comet/Jupiter Collision FAQ - Post-Impact", "Triggering of the largest Deccan eruptions by the Chicxulub impact", "Huge Global Tsunami Followed Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Impact", "Rapid ocean acidification and protracted Earth system recovery followed the end-Cretaceous Chicxulub impact", "That Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Instantly Acidified Our World's Oceans, Too", "Climatic Effect of Impacts on the Ocean", "Sun: Amount of Energy the Earth Gets from the Sun", "Seismic effects of the Caloris basin impact, Mercury", "The IAU 2009 system of astronomical constants: the report of the IAU working group on numerical standards for Fundamental Astronomy", "Light curves of type IA supernova models with different explosion mechanisms", "Big Bang Energy (Ask an Astrophysicist)", "Storage requirements for security sensitive ammonium nitrate (SSAN)", "Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (SI)", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TNT_equivalent&oldid=1150973581. Why refined oil is cheaper than cold press oil? This calculator and the accompanying article will explain what explosion radius is and how to calculate blast radius. By clicking Post Your Answer, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy. The bottle is called a trap because thats what it does, it traps antimatter. Using PETN, engineers would need 1.0/1.66 (or 0.60) kg to obtain the same effects as 1kg of TNT. Simple? Instead of exploding, it sputters and fumes and splits into pieces and generally makes a mess. Its easy to see why secularists, desperate to explain their existence apart from a Creator, would cling to such fantastic notions. We must use a bigger bomb. I mean, in Star Trek, they use Matter/Antimatter reactions to power their starships, it's pretty powerful. What's happening is that the heat produce by the initial reaction with the surface of the chunk of sodium boils the water around it and drastically slows down the reaction. Site design / logo 2023 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under CC BY-SA. Now we need to know how this works in tons. Joules. c is the speed of light which is 299,792,458 meters per second. The question you linked is about the different ways to destroy a planet, not about the amount of antimatter needed to perform the 3 tasks in my question. Often, the responses are droll ones such as love, cocaine, cash money, computer ink, or even sex. 2 kg of $E=mc^2 = 1.79 \times 10^{17} J$. There's not really any point translating that to Australian dollars because it's absurd either way. The NIAC is currently researching antimatter powered spaceships, and according to NASA it looks promising. All the galaxies, the clusters of galaxies, the stars, the planets, us. But case 2 deserves a better answer after all anti-matter is not cheap and they are always out of stock at Home Depot. The term "TNT equivalence" is a normalization technique for equating properties of an explosive to TNT, the standard. The "kiloton (of TNT equivalent)" is a unit of energy equal to 4.184 terajoules (4.1841012J). Would it just be a stupidly bright flash? He says an alternative hypothesis is that we're living in a part of the Universe filled with matter but other parts might be full of antimatter. You get high-energy (~100 MeV) gammas, medium-energy (e.g., 511 keV) gammas, pions, muons, and neutrinos. The very find dust gets around the problem that a chunk of antimatter in the presence of ordinary matter acts a bit like a chunk of sodium dropped into water. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. This worksheet uses the property of energy called the heat of combustion or heat of explosion and is expressed in units of kilocalories per gram. For an explosion of TNT equivalent mass, WWW and scaled distance, ZZZ. The blast radius for the 1 kg bare explosive detonation is 130 m. This answer is obtained by using the range safety equation, based on Hopkinson-Cranz Law: The intensity of the blast wave front is inversely proportional to the cube of the distance. The positrons will meet electrons and produce 0.511 MeV gammas, but the protons meeting antiprotons will initially have a quark annihilate . Use MathJax to format equations. Under controlled conditions one kilogram of TNT can destroy (or even obliterate) a small vehicle. Frank Close, a particle physicist at the University of Oxford, points out the time problem, too. The reality is that. But other than this probably being impossible, it may just start the race for the antimatter bomb. Space Mechs or Tanks or Planes or Marines - Fighting in space without blowing up each other's starships. The height of the fireball was over seven times the height of Everest. 10 grams of antimatter will annihilate 10 g matter, which just produces 429.6 kT. Check your math. "One particle is left over out of a billion, and this one particle out of a billion is everything we see in the Universe. So each 2 kg antimatter bomb (as it annihilates with 1kg ordinary matter) would have a blast similar to the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated in the puny humans' history. Just one 10 thousandths of a gram of antimatter could send a spaceship to Mars in only 45 days.