Comment by contravariant
4 days ago
Well what is the most obvious application of a highly volatile energy dense substance?
This substance can basically only do two things.
1) whatever ordinary hydrogen can
2) explode violently on contact with matter
Sure it's interesting to test 1) from a physics research point of view, but 2) is the only practical application that I know of.
As a luddite, when I get in to my car to drive to work, I harness the power of several hundred violent explosions per minute in order for my non-science fiction car to get to work. If I had a homelab sized source of anti-matter violent explosions, youtube university in this hypothetical universe could help me harness it into something that generates electricity or something fun and useful, and not for killing people.
If your car suffers a catastrophic exothermic event with its fuel, that looks like a car fire.
If the same energy explodes as antimatter, to the extent that it is not radiation shielded what you get is a pulse of high-energy ionising radiation*; while to the extent that it is radiation shielded, it looks like order-of as many kg of TNT as the number of kWh stored, give or take.
* with a note that 10 joules of absorbed energy per kg of body mass is "if you're lucky you will fall into a coma and die in about a week, if you're unlucky you'll be conscious", and that 1 litre of ICE fuel ~= 10 kWh = 36 megajoules.
Propulsion with antimatter drives is another application. That’s not consumer-facing though.