Tag: anti-matter

FedEx Boldly Goes Where No Man Has Gone Before

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When Scotty needs a shipment of anti-matter does he expect to see an Amazon truck or maybe FedEx?  Well, maybe not yet but who knows about tomorrow?

Antimatter has been transported for the first time ever — in the back of CERN’s truck

“On 24 March, a team at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, transported 92 antiprotons in a specially designed bottle that traps the particles using magnetic fields. The bottle travelled on the back of a truck, taking a 30-minute journey around the lab’s site.”

Alright, to be realistic, the Starship Enterprise couldn’t reach Warp Factor 8 on 92 antiprotons.  In fact, you probably couldn’t lift your pinky off the table with the energy produced by that amount of matter/anti-matter annihilation.

https://youtu.be/0xD9qEdHFIE?si=zCKTeF3RTXgm51yZ&t=52

But if we can send anti-matter by delivery truck today who knows what next week will bring?  Someday I may be able to order up a bushel basket of Higgs bosons or a peck of top quarks.  The sky’s the limit.

I read somewhere that the folks dreaming about interstellar travel were hypothesizing that anti-matter could be more easily stored if it was cooled down to just above absolute zero.  I remember thinking, “Does this sound like we’re making it easier or harder by requiring it to reach such a difficult state.  But maybe I’m wrong.  My whole experience with cryogenics had to do with trying to build a cooling jacket for a chemical reactor that used liquid nitrogen to run some organic synthesis steps at ridiculously low temperatures.  And to be totally honest, I wasn’t convinced that the chemists really had any specific reactions that needed these conditions.  They just wanted to make sure that the system they built couldn’t possibly be unable to produce the temperatures, pressures and chemical corrosion resistance parameters that they had promised to their boss.  But anyway, if you can imagine anti-matter travelling in a truck then you can further reckon with anti-matter at 0.01 K sitting in the hold of a star ship waiting to be combined with normal matter to produce impulse to accelerate the ship toward Proxima Centauri.  I just know I won’t be volunteering for that first trip, thank you very much.

So, since we’re discussing anti-matter, I’m still waiting to hear where all the anti-matter in the universe is hiding.  After all, I seem to remember that according to all the theories out there, the universe should have exactly equal quantities of matter and anti-matter.  Well, where is it?

Somewhere out there shouldn’t there be an anti-photog, out there running an anti-OFC website and publishing his novel “The Anti-Sniper”?  Maybe all the missing antimatter is also, all the missing dark matter they’re always looking for.  But whatever the reality, if we’re starting to ship anti-protons around it’s only a matter of time before the commodities exchanges start listing anti-matter on the big board and before you know it, I’ll be able to trade puts and calls for anti-matter.  What would a butterfly spread on anti-neutrons cost on expiration Friday.  Hmmm.

Which Way; Out or In

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So, yesterday I attached that discussion about how matter/anti-matter annihilation could theoretically act as an energy source with a high enough power density to allow for interplanetary space travel and possibly interstellar travel.  Now something like this thought experiment is so nebulous in its details that even calling it a low probability outcome is being way too optimistic.  The idea that a ship would contain some huge number of ultra tiny anti-matter snow balls in storage for perhaps decades of travel seems ludicrously improbable.  Especially since any one anti-matter snow ball will immediately destroy the space craft if containment is breached for any of a million reasons.

And yet, in a way, the very difficulty of the process somehow makes me think that somewhere hidden in this improbability is an elegant solution to the problem that will be discovered when it becomes time for such a process to move us forward.  It can’t and won’t happen now because we don’t need it now.  Going to Mars or Ganymede isn’t currently something that humanity needs badly.  We don’t even need a Moon base.  But eventually all three of these celestial locations will become important to humanity.  When or how these places will become critical is indeterminate.  But just because we don’t know the when or the how makes no difference.  We went to the Moon in 1969 because German missile technology and American technological curiosity collided during the Cold War and handed us space flight.

Something else will come along and we’ll stumble into the next piece of the puzzle while working on something completely different.  And this pattern will repeat itself over the course of a decade or two and, then voila! A matter/anti-matter rocket will be tested in space.  And then twenty years later it will become old-hat.

Does this mean that I believe that we can do anything?  No.  We’re not God or all powerful.  Notice that I haven’t stated that faster than light travel (FTL) is possible.  As far as I know humans lack the ability to reprogram the universe to increase the speed at which matter may travel to something faster than 186,000 miles per second and probably never will.  But reaching a technical solution that allows us to get as close to that limit as possible is what we’ll do.

What I envision is a robot ship powered by matter/anti-matter annihilation.  The first applications for this capability will be unmanned reconnaissance of the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt.  And this will be followed by manned missions.  Eventually, there will be a robot mission to the nearest star.  What we find there may decide the trajectory of our race into the unforeseeable future.  If we stumble upon a planet with life already present then that planet will become the focus of the imagination of our world.  And eventually we will send men there.

But if we search planet after planet and never find life of any kind that may cause mankind to turn inward and look for progress of a different kind.  And maybe that is the higher wisdom.