Pamela finds antimatter supply near Earth

[Zero Kelvin]

No, not Pamela Anderson: Antimatter belt around Earth discovered by Pamela craft

Fascinating -- I wonder what the production rate is and how many antiprotons are up there waiting to be harvested.

 

[JarodRussell]

A natural, renewable antimatter source close to Earth. That would be pretty awesome, I guess.

 

[Zero Kelvin]

I expect there's a great deal more AM trapped in Jupiter's radiation belts.

ETA: A proposal for harvesting the AM particles:

EXTRACTION OF ANTIPARTICLES CONCENTRATED IN PLANETARY MAGNETIC FIELDS

The estimates given are that Earth's supply is 160ng (nanogrammes) replenished at a rate of 2ng/year; Jupiter's is 6μg (microgrammes) replished at a rate of 7μg/year; Saturn's is 10μg replenished at a rate of 240μg/year. Saturn would appear to be the best bet --although 1g is only equivalent to about 20 kilotonnes of TNT if I recall correctly (or 9 x 10^16 Joules per kg).

 

[YellowSubmarine]

That's barely 42 grams of TNT equivalent a year for the Earth and 140 kilograms of TNT equivalent per year for Jupiter. Not the thing that you can use for a big bomb, let alone for propulsion or other energy uses. We need to learn to manufacture that stuff. Though I imagine it could be useful to blow up the vehicle used to harvest it.

 

[Zero Kelvin]

Yeah, in some respects it took a heck of a lot more energy to write a 120-page tome on the mere possibility.

 

[scotthm]

We need to learn to manufacture that stuff.

It takes energy to create and store anti-matter. We're not going to invent a process that creates more energy than it consumes.

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[YellowSubmarine]

Who implied that? Antimatter has the potential to be the most efficient battery. Of course I use “potential” quite loosely, because you first need to solve the problem of storage in an efficient manner and the problem of production in an efficient manner, and the latter might be even unsolvable. But even at quite bad production efficiency it still has the potential to be used for interstellar propulsion, because it will reduce the mass of the spacecraft significantly.

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

How? By annihilating the craft that tries to contain it?

 

[YellowSubmarine]

I guess that could work if your “spacecraft” is just a relativistic missile for interstellar warfare! But I was thinking about annihilating only a part of the the spacecraft that we would conveniently refer to as “fuel”, something like this Positron Propelled Space Transport Vehicle. (PDF)

Update: Oh, I didn't get the joke, haha. Perhaps I should read my own posts before reading the replies. I disagree though, after annihilation the relativistic mass doesn't change.

 

[Zero Kelvin]

We need to learn to manufacture that stuff.

It takes energy to create and store anti-matter. We're not going to invent a process that creates more energy than it consumes.

As YS mentions, AM would be used as a compact potential energy store. Presently "going to waste", there's the vast solar energy flux over nearly the full 4pi steradians that we could exploit for the next few billion years.