The blast radius becomes a critical parameter in such scenarios. An explosive, upon detonation, releases a large amount of energy. Could a subterranean river or aquifer generate enough continuous momentum to power a waterwheel for the purpose of producing electricity? All the galaxies, the clusters of galaxies, the stars, the planets, us. And yet, there is very little antimatter in the universeso its been a known problem for many years. In all honesty you can probably get away with less because the force of the explosion will likely kill many humans. Current technology only allows us to store small amounts of antimatter in each Penning trap. The positron has the same mass as an electron but with a positive charge, rather than negative. This means that even if a supposed Big Bang could somehow create a universe, that universe would forever remain devoid of matter, unlike the actual universe in which we live. An antimatter weapon is a theoretically possible device using antimatter as a power source, a propellant, or an explosive for a weapon. We could make this happen if we work at it. 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. A kiloton of TNT can be visualized as a cube of TNT 8.46 metres (27.8ft) on a side. Small TNT explosions, especially in the open, don't tend to burn the carbon-particle and hydrocarbon products of the explosion. Photons are bundles of electromagnetic energy. ", "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? An antimatter powered spaceship would have a higher thrust-weight ratio than ones powered by other fuels, which means it could travel faster. "So this is by far the most energetic process that you can think of.". What if I had a gram? Professor Doser once estimated how muchit would cost to make antimatter in large amounts. In 1996, the Mars Global Surveyor took 11 months to arrive at Mars. Of course, getting even a milligram of antimatter is going to be tou. Collisions between these photons would have resulted in the production of particlesparticles which would eventually become stars, galaxies, and people. Such a wave can be catastrophic depending upon its intensity. But even this is insanely expensive for only one bullet. Or a kilogram? When it hits the target the capsule breaks and the air/target get hit by the antimatter. The antimatter bomb would by far be the most powerful thing humans ever created. That should be a pure gamma output initially, but I'm curious as to what would happen to the atmosphere - what will happen to that much energy, will fission happen and how much life will survive? Another way of weaponising antimatter is to use it to power spaceships which could potentially be used for warfare. The basic principleis that so much energy is concentrated at a single point that it creates mass the mass of matter. Antimatter weapon - Wikipedia What if I had 1 anti-hydrogen atom or enough antimatter that's equal in "weight" to a hydrogen atom? 1 megaton is about 4.2x10 15 J. Nope. This calculation helps us in finding the pressure loads on objects. The word "antimatter" is not even mentioned anywhere in your question. Different types of antimatter require different types of traps. The storage rings on the spacecraft will hold the antimatter. Such that: You can calculate the blast radius or stand-off distance using the Hopkinson-Cranz scaling law. It was created by an international team of scientists at CERN. Ten things you might not know about antimatter Crash it into an iridium block. Anti Matter Energy Calculator. explosions - Putting grams of antimatter in the atmosphere - Physics Find out more about shock waves in our oblique shock calculator and Prandtl Meyer expansion calculator. (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. ", "La Garita Mountains grew from volcanic explosions 35 million years ago", "The thought experiment: What would happen if the supervolcano under Yellowstone erupted? Safety, Health & Environmental Affairs Committee, Transportation, Distribution & Security Committee. Antimatter is actually produce by all sorts of things, for instance bananas produce antimatter. What can I do with 100 grams of antimatter? - Quora Would it be imperceptible? Strange Frontiers, episode 2:The factory where one of the most expensive and elusive materials is made. First, let's talk about blast waves. >$10^{15}kg$, it's not exactly rocket science. Still a big bang. Which ability is most related to insanity: Wisdom, Charisma, Constitution, or Intelligence? One of the scariest things about the antimatter bomb is that the effects of it arent as long lasting as a nuclear bomb. [3], The kiloton and megaton of TNT equivalent have traditionally been used to describe the energy output, and hence the destructive power, of a nuclear weapon. Sorry, but I don't know where you can get the text of this book online. Check out 477 similar physics calculators, Social Media Time Alternatives Calculator. Now you can destroy all life on earth using only about 6E4 kg of antimatter, only 60 metric tons of the good stuff. The total power of aluminized mixtures strictly depends on the condition of explosions. "Perhaps, just under four billion years ago, the Earth could have been hit by asteroids up to 400 kilometers across, forty times bigger than the one that is supposed to have been responsible for the K/T extinctions. TNT equivalent is a convention for expressing energy, typically used to describe the energy released in an explosion. Antimatter is one of the costliest materials in the world. This means that although equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have formed, they weren't quite equal, he adds. 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. How much antimatter would we need in order to wipe out all humans As we learned in real estate, location, location, location. (Note that this is not creation out of nothing, but rather the conversion of pre-existing energy into matter.) (considering low energy state) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron%E2%80%93positron_annihilation Share Cite Improve this answer And that means no particles would remain to eventually become people, stars, and galaxies. 2 kg of $E=mc^2 = 1.79 \times 10^{17} J$. But say I had 1 Antimatter Electron, and I just opened a container in a room, what would happen? The team hasn't found any other meaningful differences between matter and antimatter. The antihydrogen gets stuck in the area with the weakest magnetic field. So in this Big Bang scenario, particles and antiparticles would have been coming into existence and then annihilating one another in equal measure. Some of the radiation will doubtless cause fission or transmutation - a nucleus hit by an anti-proton is likely to at least lose a nucleon, and the mesons also happily react with nuclei. This page was last edited on 21 April 2023, at 04:10. The OP wanted it all in one bomb, so I told him his bomb must release at least that much energy. To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader. Matter-antimatter annihilation from a hypothetical macroscopic explosion would produce the same particles as proton-antiproton annihilation in microscopic quantities in accelerator experiments. Such an asteroid would boil away the oceans and transform the atmosphere into one of steam and molten rock." The term "TNT equivalence" is a normalization technique for equating properties of an explosive to TNT, the standard. If the number of Short Tons is larger than 300, you should submit USGS form 9-4040-A. "Bananas are a perfect unit for antimatter production. [4], Alternative values for TNT equivalency can be calculated according to which property is being compared and when in the two detonation processes the values are measured. The Truth about Angels, Demons and Antimatter | Live Science And based on what we know about this terrifying-sounding substance, the Universe probably shouldn't exist at all. All of the antiprotons created at Fermilab's Tevatron particle accelerator add up to only 15 nanograms. If you want to kill all humans on earth, you have a couple of options: According to this person 57 trillion annihilations at 30 cm gives you 1 rad of radiation. In order to store antimatter it has to be kept in a sealed container and held up with magnets so that it floats. thanks for the detailed answer! any large scale destruction of a city, with non antimatter device, on earth of a nuclear ready country would trigger mutually assured destruction, in what is estimated to be a thousand times over. "One particle is left over out of a billion, and this one particle out of a billion is everything we see in the Universe. For an explosion of TNT equivalent mass, WWW and scaled distance, ZZZ. Hence why I'm thinking they may have tried to say "Nope, 3,000m of Antimatter would really only be an explosion this big" as opposed to "Something as big as your hand would utterly level half of Rome" which is significantly smaller than 3,000m. 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. The approximate radiant heat energy released during 3-phase, 600V, 100kA, Conventional bombs yield from less than one ton to, A real 0.454-kiloton-of-TNT (1.90TJ) charge at. Would one atom of antimatter be lethal if annihilated inside the brain? This service may include material from Agence France-Presse (AFP), APTN, Reuters, AAP, CNN and the BBC World Service which is copyright and cannot be reproduced. In other words, antimatter planets, antimatter stars or antimatter galaxies could be a thing. This makes it incredibly hard to store antimatter. Still a single bomb, it destroys the earth and you have plenty of time for popcorn while you wait. Could a subterranean river or aquifer generate enough continuous momentum to power a waterwheel for the purpose of producing electricity? . Quora - A place to share knowledge and better understand the world [1] By way of comparison, the cost of the Manhattan Project (to produce the first atomic bomb) is estimated at US$23 billion in 2007 prices. Explosive Yield of a Photon Torpedo. - ST-v-SW.Net [1], The paramount advantage of such a theoretical weapon is that antimatter and matter collisions result in the entire sum of their mass energy equivalent being released as energy, which is at least two orders of magnitude greater than the energy release of the most efficient fusion weapons (100% vs 0.4-1%). Currently we use fusion not antimatter, however whereas fusion only converts 1% of the fuels mass energy into thrust, antimatter can convert 40%. What could humans do to render the earth uninhabitable? It's exactly the same as matter, except all the electrical charges of its component parts are reversed. These complications have been sidestepped by convention. (On a much bigger scale to be sure -- it's not a good thing to have around the neighborhood.). The solar constant of the sun is 1370 watts per square meter and Earth has a, The solar constant of the sun is 1370 watts per square meter and Earth has a cross-sectional surface area of, 2022 Hunga TongaHunga Haapai volcanic eruption, total energy produced worldwide by all nuclear testing and combat, "Tons (Explosives) to Gigajoules Conversion Calculator", "Joules to Megatons Conversion Calculator", Blast effects of external explosions (Section 4.8. It only takes a minute to sign up. rev2023.5.1.43405. Antimatter weapons would be the most destructive and powerful in human history, so why dont they exist? The blast radius is the distance up to which the explosion will have an effect. 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. However, humans have produced only a minuscule amount of antimatter. The Big Bang is, and always has been, unsupported speculation. Here they create and capture this bizarre anti-stuff. Shock waves The "kiloton (of TNT equivalent)" is a unit of energy equal to 4.184 terajoules (4.1841012J). 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. Then her family intervened, Celebrities arrive at the Met Gala for fashion's biggest night, A year ago, this Australian couple fled Ukraine with their three cats. Total solar output in all directions per day. 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. We have to double the figure because that's the antimatter mass, and we're converting that mass of antimatter plus an equal mass of matter into energy. This bomb was only 50 megatons. You can think of it as matter's evil twin. 1 Answer. Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics. I definitely think #1 is overkill in his answer though. At the moment of the Big Bang, all the energy of the Universe was concentrated and exploded. Though one of the answer does say that we would need 1.3 trillion tonnes of antimatter to blow up the Earth. Which ability is most related to insanity: Wisdom, Charisma, Constitution, or Intelligence? Unexpected uint64 behaviour 0xFFFF'FFFF'FFFF'FFFF - 1 = 0? Antimatter - Wikipedia NASA - New and Improved Antimatter Spaceship for Mars Missions 10 grams of antimatter will annihilate 10 g matter, which just produces 429.6 kT. Source: Ian Goddard and Cockell, Charles S. Impossible Extinction. Air Force Researching Antimatter Weapons - Slashdot Indeed this is a polar-explosion (1 gamma to one side and the other to opposite side). Did you get it? Most of the mass is antiprotons, which can annihilate with protons or neutrons, leading to $e^{\pm}$, $\gamma$, and mesons. As radioisotopes in bananasdecay, they release pairs of electrons and anti-electrons. Similarly, you can estimate the blast radius for c4 explosives too. With careful planning, I expect less well less than 1 gram of antimatter would be needed to make this a bad day for the earth. Something like this would probably be your optimal (in terms of parsimonious use of anti matter, anyway) approach for #1 and #2. Scientists have trouble finding antimatter however it can be created for a hefty price. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform. The positrons will meet electrons and produce 0.511 MeV gammas, but the protons meeting antiprotons will initially have a quark annihilate . "[When] a proton and antiproton annihilate each other, their mass completely disappears," Professor Dosersays. Now, we wouldn't want that, would we? They dont allow anything to shake their commitment to the Big Bang story, even the conclusion that our universe shouldnt exist if the Big Bang were true! Speed it up enormously 3. "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. To some degree this is just like a normal nuclear explosion of the same yield. At least when you think in other literature, something that could fit in your hand could destroy literally an entire country. (W/W) = (R/R). Why 1.810 14 joules? The cost of creating antimatter like this makes it the world's most expensive substance. The TNT equivalent appears in various nuclear weapon control treaties, and has been used to characterize the energy released in asteroid impacts. But case 2 deserves a better answer after all anti-matter is not cheap and they are always out of stock at Home Depot. Frank Close, a particle physicist at the University of Oxford, points out the time problem, too. 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. You get high-energy (~100 MeV) gammas, medium-energy (e.g., 511 keV) gammas, pions, muons, and neutrinos. Answer (1 of 6): Let's assume a gram of antihydrogen, which would release about 2 GeV per annihilation. Actually, its even worse than that, because matter and antimatter particles annihilate one another whenever they come into contact! But whenever this happens when loads of energy gets concentrated and turned into the mass of matter antimatter isborn too. 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. Antimatter annihilation from anti-hydrogen is surprisingly messy: it will not be pure gamma rays. Use MathJax to format equations. "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. $> 10^{32}J$. Something less than 7g to kill every human. So to kill all humans you need 406,900 kg of antimatter. What positional accuracy (ie, arc seconds) is necessary to view Saturn, Uranus, beyond? 2 * (mass of earth) * c^2 And the answer is $1.0735089\times10^{42}$ J (joules) Wolfram Alpha gave the following helpful equivalency: $( \frac{1}{93} )\times$ energy released from a supernova $(\approx 1\times 10 . "You need 2,000 times more energy to make [anti-protons]," he says. ", National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, "How much energy does an earthquake release? There is such a thing as an antimatter trap. This law states that two identical explosives produce similar blast waves but have different sizes, given the conditions, geometry, and scaled distances are identical. Antimatter are difficult to create and much less to contain. Learn how and when to remove this template message, Antimatter-catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion, "Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons / Program was touted publicly, then came official gag order", "Laser technique produces bevy of antimatter", "Details on antimatter triggered fusion bombs - NextBigFuture.com", "Angels & Demons: The Physics Behind The Movie (and The Book)", "Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons: Program was touted publicly, then came official gag order", Page discussing the possibility of using antimatter as a trigger for a thermonuclear explosion, Paper discussing the number of antiprotons required to ignite a thermonuclear weapon, Safety of high-energy particle collision experiments, Existential risk from artificial intelligence, Self-Indication Assumption Doomsday argument rebuttal, Self-referencing doomsday argument rebuttal, List of dates predicted for apocalyptic events, List of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Antimatter_weapon&oldid=1139434888, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles needing additional references from August 2020, All articles needing additional references, Articles containing potentially dated statements from 2004, All articles containing potentially dated statements, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 15 February 2023, at 03:22. Would it be similarly anti-climactic? The blast radius is merely an indicative number, and it is still UNSAFE to be anywhere close to the blast radius in a real-world scenario. Approximately 10 grams of antiprotons would be enough fuel to send a manned spacecraft to Mars in one month. Anti-matter Energy Calculator 1 gram of TNT = 2930.76 joules. So it depends on how much anti-matter you have. A merger of two black holes, resulting in the. This result eliminates one possible loophole that Big Bang cosmologists were hoping to exploit in an attempt to solve this longstanding problem with their model. At least a trillion tons, probably an order of magnitude or so more when you account for noncentral location and dissipation loss. achieving the specified result. Can antimatter projectiles work as disintegration weapons? Number 3 just a really big bang deep down. And so do we! You can maybe kill everyone with less antimatter if you settled for giving everyone cancer instead. 3.5 nanograms of antimatter would equal the amount of explosive in an average hand grenade with about an effective 15m blast/shrapnel radius. Scientists estimate creating and storing a gram of antimatter would cost in excess of a million billion dollars and require about 25 million billion kilowatt-hours of energy. But, taking the statement as accurate (and the source appears to be of generally high quality to me). A typical blast wave has a high-pressure jump, which denotes the wavefront. 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. If you really need to do this on the cheap, a 400 km asteroid is really quite a bit of overkill and a 100 km asteroid is probably enough to kill all animal life big enough to be interesting to most people although it may not completely sterilize the earth, and your only need 1 metric ton to target earth. Unconventional Rocket Drives - Antimatter Propulsion For a period of time after the Big Bang there was only energy. Comparing with nuclear weapons, this is about 50 kton TNT. Although submission of USGS form 9-4040-A is not mandatory, IME recommends that applicable mining operations submit the form to keep U.S. antiproliferation authorities informed. nuclear physics - Would a matter-antimatter explosion cause fallout