Anti-Matter! Dude! Hang Around Awhile

[filkertom]

Like, 16 minutes and 40 seconds. More than 5,000 times the longest duration till now.

Where's my damn star drive!?

Comments

[lizziecrowe.livejournal.com]

Fun with science! Thus is huge, all things considered. Now, on to larger atoms, compounds, and dare I say it, USES. Give it a century and this could get interesting!!!

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

Fueling a star drive like this is like throwing buckets of gasoline at your open fill pipe and hoping a few drops get down into the tank. The technique still needs a LOT of refining.

[jazz007.livejournal.com]

First step toward our flying cars?

[alverant.livejournal.com]

I doubt there will ever be flying cars for the simple fact that when a car breaks down, it doesn't crash the way an airplane would if it crashes.

[jazz007.livejournal.com]

Killjoy :P

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

How about ground-level cars which can optionally connect to a managed aerial network which flies everything remotely from fixed takeoff/landing points?

Once your cities can start being 200 miles across, it shouldn't be much of an issue to have a grid of undeveloped land under the major flight paths. Or even concrete commercial storage units (for nonvolatiles) covered with something able to catch a plummeting car.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

The cases against flying cars:
1, flying takes enormous energy. A flying car would have to be able to fly for the same fuel per mile cost as a regular car.
2, terrorists would be able to wreak massive damage with only a dozen vehicles smashing into towers. Even if the threat is minimal, someone on high will worry about it and ban for that reason alone.
3, people are too incompetent to reliably control a vehicle moving at sedate speeds in only 2 dimensions -- you expect them to manually control something moving at a couple hundred miles an hour in 3?
4, insurance and licensing would be for aircraft and very expensive. Licensing and training too.

What I believe we will see instead is a Smart traffic system where you can get in your fully fueled car and enter a destination, and it'll drive you there. You can sleep some between cities as your car handles the boring job for you, then wake up either to refuel or to arrive at your destination. You awake at your destination, ready to go. Imagine jumping in your car for a con halfway across the country, going to sleep and except for one or two wakeups for fuel, resting for the trip. It would revolutionize everything from shipping to vacations, allowing truckers to make very long hauls without being exhausted and families to travel more efficiently.

[alverant.livejournal.com]

We already have something like that. We've had it for over 100 years. It's called trains and look at how well they're doing. Unfortunately people like to be in control of their cars. You're asking people who have driven all their lives to sit back and do nothing while a computer drives their vehicle. It may be technically possible, but I don't know how many people would use it.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Make it optional. People who want to manually drive are welcome to get driver's licenses. People who want to manually fly are welcome to get pilot's licenses. People who don't have the requisite license for certain types pf travel can still access those travel options via the automated method.

As a bonus, having an automated ground-level system in place would mean that cars could drive drunk people home and people physically unable to drive could still get to wherever they wanted to go. And because it was optional, people would start using it for other things - businesspeople in order to get some work in during travel time, parents to attend to child passengers, people feeling tired after a long day. The knowledge that they could take the wheel back any time they wanted would often be enough to make them not do it very often.

[smparadox.livejournal.com]

Antimatter isn't really a practical fuel source. It takes too much energy to create it, it's massively less efficient than oil...

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Oil is finite. As for practicality, fuel needs two things: massive energy-to-mass and energy-to-volume ratios, and storage stability. Once the second part of that is cracked for antimatter, it'll probably take over everywhere, as on the first part it beats oil hollow.

Sure, it'll probably turn up first in city-powering reactors, then in cargo ships and industrial parks, then in military ships, mining vehicles, trains, factories, backup generators, passenger jets, and business jets. Whether they make their way down to rather crash-prone individual vehicles would probably depend on whether it's deemed safer to simply use batteries and recharge them off the grid, or whether antimatter containment has been developed to the point that you can buy something the size and weight of a cannonball to power your car for ten years.

[zibblsnrt.livejournal.com]

Antimatter containment in every step of the supply chain also has to be utterly infallibly perfect without the tiniest possibility of exception, unlike any other possible energy source in all of existence.

It's not gonna happen.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

If you can create a bombproof cannonball with an antimatter pea inside, it automatically makes the supply chain at least as perfect as the everyday use.

I would suggest having an environmental degradation failure mode engineered in, though. If you lose one of these things, you don't want it to suddenly nuke the area in forty years' time.

[smparadox.livejournal.com]

Antimatter only beats oil if you leave out how much energy it takes to make it. It takes a certain amount of energy to extract oil from the ground and to refine it, and it takes a certain amount of energy to create antimatter. The amounts do not compare. Once oil runs out, well, so will antimatter really, since it takes huge amounts of oil to generate the enormous amounts of energy to create minuscule amounts of antimatter and the enormous amounts of energy needed to store it. Once other sources of energy replace oil, it could still be more efficient to use them to create *oil* as a storage medium...

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Antimatter does not need oil to create it. Any energy source will do.

The unrecoverable part of the fuel creation process (ie energy which will not be recovered by using the antimatter as fuel), plus the shipping cost to consumers and associated maintenance costs, does not necessarily have to be greater per kWh. In addition, antimatter generators do not have to be located on oilfields, or in any particular location.

For usage costs, consider:
- Antimatter generators can be closer to the point of sale than oilfields. Find an empty piece of desert, drill a hole two miles deep, build your generator.
- Antimatter would weigh a ridiculous amount less per kWh than oil. A one-kilo cannonball with one gram of antimatter in it would deliver about the same energy as 660 thousand gallons of gas. If you're driving a modern car that gets even 50mpg, that's thirty million miles of driving between refuels. Cars could be sold new with all the fuel they'd ever need built right in. That's the fuel tank, pumps, refuelling pipework, battery, alternator, and exhaust system which can be tossed overboard immediately, making the car cheaper, lighter, and with an even higher MPG. And of course you'd never need to burn fuel getting to and from a gas station.
- So there wouldn't even really need to be a storage or massive distribution network. New cars would get trucked out to the antimatter plant, have their AM systems installed, and be trucked directly to the showroom or car lot. If an airplane or boat was built, the manufacturer could have a power plant delivered in a single journey by armored car if they wanted.

How much infrastructure and energy is currently put into oil extraction, refinement, transport, storage, and maintenance of existing systems? The thousands of miles of pipeline? The enormous refinement plants? The oceangoing supertankers and roadgoing delivery tankers? Gas stations themselves? Aircraft fuel? Boat fuel? Onsite backup generators? Fuel storage sheds?

Want to create an antimatter fuel cell for a car as described? A two-kilometer square array of solar cells will collect the necessary energy in one day (twelve hours of sun). Even accounting for weather conditions, maintenance, and the cost of converting photons to antimatter, we're looking at around one week per square kilometer per car fuel cell. Fifty a year. Five hundred a year, if you're turning out three-million-mile cells instead of thirty-megamile. Fifty thousand per year, if you make the cells a thirty-thousand-mile replacement part.

There are a lot of empty square kilometers in the desert.

North America's own deserts and arid areas, for example, could turn out more than enough antimatter fuel cells to power every new vehicle sold in the US and Canada ten to a hundred times over.

In parting, I'd also mention that of course antimatter takes a lot of excess energy to produce right now - we're only just starting to figure out how to do it. It's hardly a commercial process.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

There is a theory that matter can be turned into antimatter given a field which can flip a quark's state. Said field is the problem. But if such exists, any and all matter becomes fuel as you can change one particle, it annhilates with another particle in the atom, and the surrounding matter becomes plasma which thrusts the vehicle to fractional c velocities.

[smparadox.livejournal.com]

Such a field would be a game-changer. Depending, of course, on how much energy it took to flip how many quarks...

[dave-ifversen.livejournal.com]

We make and use antimatter at the lab all the time (I work at Fermilab - we probably produce more antimatter than anyone, and then collide it with matter to see what happens). It takes *a lot* of energy to make even the smallest amount, and leaves behind some highly radioactive waste when you are done making it. With current methods of production and storage, it is just not viable as a fuel source. We did have a couple of scientists who wanted to decelerate the antiprotons to zero energy, put them in a kind of penning trap for transport off-site, and use them in rocket fuel experiments - the proposal never went anywhere and the two scientists went off to start their own company.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

Were they the guys who were trying to work with antiproton-initiated DU fission for interplanetary flight? ISTR a couple of people with SBIR money trying to get something going with the Ceramics Section folks here on fuel element fabrication--DU oxide in a TaC shell (to contain fission/spallation products), or some such.