Antimatter Belt Discovered Around Earth

It can't really be that big, otherwise space probes would blow up everytime they passed through it.

For that we have to ask how dense is the belt and how much mass is each piece of anti-matter. It would take a fairly large portion of it to cause the destruction of a space probe.

I think the idea is that, as a spaceship is passing through the anti-matter belt, it snags some to fuel itself up for the rest of the trip. Going up into space just to bring some back to Earth might not be cost effective. The article says it's all in anti-proton form; even for a fuel source as potent as anti-matter, that's still a little dinky.

Well, that's where the "we don't have the infrastructure to use it" part comes in. While we did cancel the space shuttle program, it seems to be relatively cheap to get unmanned satellites up there.

Yeah, A stream of free antiprotons isn't likely to be causing any catastrophic explosions (though you still wouldn't want to stand in it or anything). IIRC the rest mass of a proton is a hair under 1 GeV/c², so you'd get about 2 GeV for an annihilating pair.

For layman's reference, Q-values of standstill beta radiation tends to range around 1 MeV give or take an order of magnitude. So picture something in the range of 100 times as intense as Green Rocks sitting on the table, but way less particles doing it in the first place and can't self-sustain.

edited 7th Aug '11 7:40:28 PM by Pykrete

Your layman's terms aren't helping. Would it be viable to use it for fuel?

As a fuel source itself? I dunno, the containment would have beed hellish to build...but inject some of it to jumpstart fusion like in military engine in Mass Effect sounds plausible ala Antimatter catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion...

edited 7th Aug '11 7:55:49 PM by onyhow

I would express doubt, but I'd be open to seeing what happens. If these are antiprotons we're talking about, I'd be more interested in thinking about how we might use it to activate other elements into fissionable materials or something.

EDIT: Ninja'd by . Antimatter is probably more likely to be a step to the real fuel, not the fuel itself.

Basically don't expect anything like "chunk of antimatter" that you lob at something and get an explosion. More likely it'd be "tiny beam of particles produces noticeable but very small effect" which we could hopefully make more impressive over the next century or so.

edited 7th Aug '11 7:46:33 PM by Pykrete

Well I certainly hope this doesn't cause a bunch of things to blow up.

It will cause a lot of things to blow up. They'll just all be nanoscopic.

Besides, it must be fairly dispersed. We've sent a lot of spacecraft through those regions (some of them manned) and yet they didn't seem to be significantly affected in any way.

Well in a way we are able to measure.

well if it's a "small" belt in scientific terms that could mean nano or smaller. It's entirely possible we just haven't hit it yet.

Space is big. Maybe there is a pocket of the stuff somewhere which is reasonably close (i.e half point between Earth and Mars in a place that miraculously happened to be in the trajectory of a hypothetical man spaced flight to the red planet)

And about the use of it as a bomb, if it werent for WWII and the cold war the atom bomb would not have been developed, I say this with certain degree of confidence, until two decades later, or even more.

Also some what related to this discussion, this quote from Back to the Future:

"Dr. Emmett Brown: I'm sure that in 1985 plutonium is available in every corner drugstore, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by"

edited 7th Aug '11 8:28:36 PM by Baff

Don't we have enough nuclear bombs already to wipe out human civilization? What could building even bigger bombs possibly contribute?

Because humans are like that. Someone will build it sooner or later. Mostly to state that they have a weapon that powerful.

It would still be redundant. And 1 would be more expensive than a couple dozen warheads I would expect.

and you know...in terms of international intimidation, nothing is more cost effective than the good old nuclear missile mounted on the top of a military truck during (insert nationalistic occasion) military parade

Unless it was some sort of Dooms Day Device that is.

Because if the capacity of the antimatter bomb doesnt amount to "OMGZ The 4th dimession is being Ripp Ed away By the 6th Dimensional Monzter"

the ability to lunch multiple warheads in one ICBM has got you covered.

edited 7th Aug '11 8:38:05 PM by Baff

I'd turn it into a missile that we could fire at aliens in space... Or any big asteroids coming our way ala Armageddon.

Wouldn't need to sacrifice Bruce Willis if we had antimatter.

Doesn't matter. It would be used to intimidate and humans don't care about redundacy being uncessary sometimes. See Russian Nuclear missiles which used warheads in the megatons when a few kilotons was only needed.

Besides Bruce Willis is not a very aerodynamic projectile.

edited 7th Aug '11 9:09:58 PM by TuefelHundenIV

^^ Made of Forum Win!

edited 7th Aug '11 11:18:16 PM by onyhow

You'd almost certainly have to invest more energy into retrieving it than you'd actually get out of it, and more effort into containing it than you could justify for a fuel source for anything short of a spacecraft.

As onyhow noted, the amount of antimatter needed for many spacecraft designs is so small that they would be affordable even using artificial antimatter.

Regarding weapons, the attraction of antimatter as a weapons material is that it would allow for a so-called “clean” or “pure fusion” atomic bomb, meaning they could be used without creating fallout. Whether this would alter the political fallout of their use in any way, however, is a different issue.

*snrk*

Somewhat more seriously, in regards to Soviet warheads, they had larger yields because they were needed. Soviet targeting hardware was, for much of the earlier part of the Cold War, kinda sub-par, requiring larger warheads to ensure the target would be destroyed. As Soviet targeting capabilities improved, the warheads got smaller (read: not requiring quite so large ICBMs to loft them, and allowing more flexibility as far as warhead count and countermeasures).

edited 7th Aug '11 11:35:44 PM by Nohbody

Radioactive fallout anyway. You're still kicking an obscene amount of crap into the air.

There is still the possibility of a tiny bit of fallout from neutron activation of materials in the bomb itself and from fusion products other than Helium-4 which may or may not be stable, but even if you had the maximum possible amounts of those byproducts from a very inefficient weapon with a large amount of impurities, the radioactive fallout would still be absolutely insignifigant compared to that of a fission-fusion bomb.