4 ms·
That's storage, which is one possible component of practical anti-matter propulsion. You could generate a lot of it efficiently, store what you made, and send i
by wcarss 15y ago
That's storage, which is one possible component of practical anti-matter propulsion. You could generate a lot of it efficiently, store what you made, and send it as lightweight, high yield fuel. The other alternative is to somehow make it as you go: find some way to create pairs and annihilate them in the direction opposite to the direction of thrust you desire.
If there were a cost-efficient, energy-efficient, weight-efficient way of generating even very small annihilating pairs, it would be a major propulsion technology. It would also be a major weapons technology, and the fact that we don't know about research being done on such a cool-sounding thing it means that it probably isn't being done, or is being done with surprising secrecy (kind of unlikely).
Going out on a limb, I think that means we probably have solid theoretical grounding for believing it's infeasible.
(obligatory disclaimer: I am (obviously) not a physicist)
- wcarss 15y agoActually, it may be a feasible driver of mass while not being a feasible weapon. If it takes something the size of 5-6 refrigerators to generate the particles, but they (+fuel) could generate the equivalent of >6ish refrigerators worth of our presently used fuel, it would be feasible for transportation. For weapons (I was thinking grenades and bombs) you would need to have smaller sizes, and it would have to be efficient to make the particle generators themselves. Spacecraft (at present) can be one-off designs. We could conceivably make a very expensive, reasonably lightweight, reasonably energy-efficient, reasonably large antimatter drive once while being unable to use that technology to make a reproducible superweapon.
- blake8086 15y agoHow do you give a direction to the annihilation?