Comment by vlovich123
19 hours ago
I know you’re being facetious but a 747 made out of gold is going to be ~24 billion dollars if you are doing a weight conversion. A 747 by itself is ~$400 million. The entire CERN annual electricity cost is $~25-50M.
No way this experiment had that kind of funding. I would bet the experiment itself had a few million dollars in funding at most + another few for the salaries. Max 10M all in. Probably closer to 2-5M. Expensive but not prohibitive like a 747. But for a single particle.
Scaling up no one really knows because we only do this for single particles and that’s really inefficient. At scale it’s unclear what it could look like.
But electrons/positrons cannot become fuel. Positrons repel each other. So to make any real amount of antimater, beyond counting individual particles, you need anti-protons to keep the positrons happy and containable at scale. Creating the sort of anti-hydrogen one might want to collect as fuel, THAT requires golden 747s of energy.
I could be wrong but my understanding is that’s purely a function of our technological limitations in how we create antimatter, not in the fundamental energy required. Our tech of a particle acceleration is ~1e9 times less efficient than the actual energy required because most of the energy is lost, not converted. A gram would be $~6.2M/gram if we could get to 1% energy conversion efficiency. No one bothers of course to even try because it’s not worth it - expensive, difficult, and huge energy losses. Fusion reactors for space ships will probably come before antimatter gets cracked as a battery source.