Anti-Matter Belt Discovered Around Earth 208
hydrofix writes "A thin band of antiprotons enveloping the Earth has been spotted for the first time. The find, described in Astrophysical Journal Letters [arXiv] (Note: abstract free, full text paywalled), confirms theoretical work that predicted the Earth's magnetic field could trap antimatter. The antiprotons were spotted by the Pamela satellite launched in 2006 to study the nature of high-energy particles from the Sun and cosmic rays. Aside from confirming theoretical work that had long predicted the existence of these antimatter bands, the particles could also prove to be a novel fuel source for future spacecraft — an idea explored in a report for NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts."
antimatter (Score:2, Insightful)
the particles could also prove to be a novel fuel source for future spacecraft
That's sooooo adorably naive! Everybody knows that if it turns out to be a useful power source, the governments of the world will compete with one another to turn it into a weapon. Space Race 2.0: Fuck The Manhattan Project, Shit Just Got Real!
Re:antimatter (Score:5, Funny)
That's sooooo adorably naive! Everybody knows that if it turns out to be a useful power source, the governments of the world will compete with one another to turn it into a weapon. Space Race 2.0: Fuck The Manhattan Project, Shit Just Got Real!
Talk about naive. SkyNet will use it against us while we bicker between ourselves whether or not to put the anti-matter weapons on sharks or just in the hands of evil corporations.
Mod Parent up (Score:3)
Yeah, I was telling everyone that at the end of 1999 when they had that big celebration, Nobody listened then either.
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You are technically correct. The best kind of correct.
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While likely technically correct, common usage trumps technicality. Most people regard the 1970's to be 1970-1979, etc, NOT 1971-1980. The same sort of logic applies to centuries - 20th century was 1900-1999. In fact, why don't we just declare the 1st century to be anomalous, and go on from there?
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Wait, you think that if the anti-matter belt around Earth turned out to be a useful power source that it would be governments that compete for control of it?
Sister, you are hopelessly naive.
Re:antimatter (Score:4, Funny)
I do believe shit just got Anti-Real.
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Or we'll be in almost peace by then, as the internet unites nations more and more. The hate on average is going down a lot, thanks to many realizing that real people exist on the other side of the globe. And the internet is a big part of that. Perhaps not so naive.
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You think the internet reduces hate? Have you seen the comments on Youtube, or even here?
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I know, hard to believe it was worse before isn't it?
Seriously, generally speaking, it's a lot harder for people to feel indifferent going to war, when they see others' lives on facebook, the web in general, or even through email.
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You may not change my mind when we disagree, but you might influence the opinions of some random 3rd party. If even by hammering home the notion that there can be rational parties on both sides of a disagreement and we all deserve a little respect.
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>and at least casual passers-by see both sides of any issue.
I can't think of anything more truly naive than to imagine that any issue has only two sides. Humans, especially politicians, like to think and act as if they did - but the real world never works that way. This makes the whole "both sides" tactic a wonderful form of mass-manipulation.
By ignoring all shades of gray you can take somebody from a reasonable position and rapidly get them to agree to a highly unreasonable proposition by painting it as
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There's plenty of hate on the internet, but here's the key item: It's motivated by actions and anonymity, rather than racial prejudice. More important, is that people often begin building friendships now, prior to discovering nationality.
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the internet is a tool, nothing more, nothing less. it's like a knife, actually.
Actually, the Internet is more like the shovel than the knife. Without the concept of the shovel, we would still be chasing bears out of their caves to make new housing. The lowly shovel that anybody can use changed our world. So too does the Internet.
This is on topic, since the changes in the way people relate to each other that are being brought about right now by the Internet are similar to the changes that happened between people when they started bringing their new shovels to their meetings. Instead
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2 nepalese, 1 shovel... 2 girls, 1 cup... Us western people are just as good at co-operating!
On-topic; the problem with people working together is that the one selfish person usually ends up winning.
It's why all of us have to lock our doors to stop the few thiefs and why we have laws in general.
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I think there was/is a town in North America where everyone doesn't bother to lock their doors. Can't remember the name tho...
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You think the internet reduces hate? Have you seen the comments on Youtube, or even here?
Indeed, there are hate machines on the internet.
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I can only hope your comment was intended as a troll because I have a hard time accepting someone who could be that stupid.
Wow, you're just so hateful... :)
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If these could serve as fuel, you just know that every alien civilization with space travel capabilities is already harvesting these as they go. This could serve as evidence that the earth has never been visited by extra-terrestrials, or if a significant fraction of the expected particles are missing, it's possible evidence that we were once visited.
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If these could serve as fuel, you just know that every alien civilization with space travel capabilities is already harvesting these as they go. This could serve as evidence that the earth has never been visited by extra-terrestrials, or if a significant fraction of the expected particles are missing, it's possible evidence that we were once visited.
That would be like BP offering a single shot glass worth of free gas, and then since no one wants to spend the $10 in gas to drive there and back to get a free $0.10 shot glass worth, then using it as proof that no one wants free gas...
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The antiproton belt is continuously replenished. I don't know how long it would take to replenish it if you removed all of the antiprotons but I wouldn't be surprised if it was on the order of hundreds or thousands of years.
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If weaponized antimatter was such a big draw, it would be in use by now.
Why? Because we can already manufacture it. (storage is the problem, and you'd bet your ass the Government(s) would be putting resources into solving that)
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I should think long-term storage isn't nearly as big a problem as battlefield delivery. You have to send the entire containment package to the target, because if the particles hit either their container or the atmosphere before arriving downrange, the bad things happen to the wrong people. That means the containment package has to withstand the G forces of launch and trajectory. It might work for a guided dropped bomb, but perhaps not a missile warhead and probably not an artillery shell.
Re:antimatter (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember an excellent interview a long time ago by a researcher in antimatter who was asked about weapons. His reply was 2 fold insightful:
1) Who cares, we already have tactical nukes which can fit into a brief case, how much smaller do we really need to get?
2) It's very very difficult to mix anti-matter instantaneously with a large quantity of matter. You would most likely just get a sustained very hot burn not an explosion. It's the old Fuel/Air conundrum. Per gram gasoline has more explosive power than gun powder. But you have to mix it to get it to react.
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we already have tactical nukes which can fit into a brief case
I'm assuming he wasn't a researcher in nuclear weapons development :) There's a huge [citation needed] around that myth (?).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suitcase_nuke [wikipedia.org]
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If Plutonium fissioned at the speed of air rushing in, you wouldn't get a very big boom.
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Sure we can manufacture it, but that costs a lot more energy than is contained in the antimatter produced, which kind of defeats the purpose.
That's not really the purpose.
Think about the energy it takes to deliver a couple dozen 1,000 pound bombs to a chunk of desert: you have to make the explosives, build the bomb casings, build a jet to fly the things to whereverstan, pummel a suitable piece of ground into a landing strip, defend it with a bunch of very expensive people (including air conditioning their tents), pour tens of thousands of pounds of Jet-A into the aircraft and send it off to dodge enemy defenses, then finally drop the ordnance.
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Well, I will agree with you that atomic bombs require an enormous investment, but your reasoning fails on one account: in an atomic bomb, the potential energy is already there, provided by nature. Sure we had to refine it, but in the end it is supernovas that put all that energy in the Uranium (or what have you) for us. To create an antimatter bomb, we need to produce all that potential energy ourselves, in the form of antimatter. Not only do we need to put in the potential energy itself, but also excess en
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I get what you're saying, although we seem to invest a lot of energy just to produce one high energy weapon anyway. And for fun, I'm going to pretend like this simple math counts for something.
Let's start with some values scraped off various wiki pages.
1 kWh = 3.6 megajoules.
1 kiloton of TNT == 4.184 terajoules == 4,184,000 megajoules.
Therefore a terawatt/hour is roughly comparable to a kiloton of TNT.
I'm basing the following guesses on Iran's enrichment program, which has come to light recently due to Stu
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Yet, oddly, nuclear power-plants produce more energy than they use for refinement - otherwise why would we build them ?
The problem with a nuclear bomb over a reactor is simple - the bomb releases all the energy at once - and it is effectively wasted. It knocks down buildings, kills people and then dissipates into the air.
The same amount of energy carefully released slowly over a long time can run a generator with great efficiency producing far more electricity than we used to refine the fuel - and that's de
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The problem with a nuclear bomb over a reactor is simple - the bomb releases all the energy at once - and it is effectively wasted
They also have an extremely poor conversion rate - typically in the single percentages, which is why they are typically very dirty. The other 91+% is just dispersed all over the place.
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Umm, no.
The reason we don't use nukes everywhere is that there aren't really very many targets that require a 10 kt explosion to destroy.
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With weapons, the issue is not energy invested vs energy produced, but cost vs energy deliverable.
Probably 1000 tons of TNT are cheaper than a nuclear bomb. But you can punt 3 or 4 nuclear bombs in an ICBM that would not be capable of launching a payload of 3000 or 4000 tons, or perhaps the same amount of destructive power in submarines would amout to tripling its size.
So, it is not only a function of cost.
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Sure we can manufacture it, but that costs a lot more energy than is contained in the antimatter produced, which kind of defeats the purpose.
It also costs more energy to produce a AA battery than it produces. And yet, they're in massive use, powering many devices.
Think less in terms of 'creating' energy and more in terms of energy storage / delivering.
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That's how you get research for peaceful purposes also. The ugly secret of humans is that porn and war drive many new technologies, if not most. Rather than fight it, take advantage of it.
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That's how you get research for peaceful purposes also. The ugly secret of humans is that porn and war drive many new technologies, if not most. Rather than fight it, take advantage of it.
So how do you apply Rule 34 to anti-matter?
Actually, I'm pretty sure I don't want to know.
Re:antimatter (Score:5, Interesting)
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Space Colonization [feeddistiller.com] Feed
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You are likely right @girl!
First the US blew up earth's magnetic belts with nukes in project Starfish Prime [npr.org], you know... just to see if they could.
Next... the antimatter belt. I predict project name, Apocalypse.
Zombie Apocalypse if we are all lucky.
What a grandiose scheme, it can't fail!
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They didn't find antimatter, they found anti-protons. Matter is what happens when particles arrange themselves a certain way. A few stray protons doesn't constitute matter: neither do some stray anti-protons.
Furthermore, they've found a whopping 28 of them in two years' research. Even if they'd found 28 atoms of anti-hydrogen (which would require that each anti-proton also have a positron), the amount is utterly irrelevant in terms of power generation. 28 atoms of anti-hydrogen (which I point out again that this is not) wouldn't produce a reaction capable of running a AA-battery flashlight.
I believe that the BBC has fallen victim to sensationalism and/or ignorance. It's pretty much what I've come to expect from the world press.
And I bet nobody invites you to parties anymore.
Killjoy.
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28 atoms of anti-hydrogen (which I point out again that this is not) wouldn't produce a reaction capable of running a AA-battery flashlight.
I believe that the BBC has fallen victim to sensationalism and/or ignorance. It's pretty much what I've come to expect from the world press.
So this discovery truly does not matter. Or does it not anitmatter in this case?
Re:antimatter (Score:5, Informative)
They didn't find antimatter, they found anti-protons. Matter is what happens when particles arrange themselves a certain way. A few stray protons doesn't constitute matter: neither do some stray anti-protons.
Furthermore, they've found a whopping 28 of them in two years' research. Even if they'd found 28 atoms of anti-hydrogen (which would require that each anti-proton also have a positron), the amount is utterly irrelevant in terms of power generation. 28 atoms of anti-hydrogen (which I point out again that this is not) wouldn't produce a reaction capable of running a AA-battery flashlight.
I believe that the BBC has fallen victim to sensationalism and/or ignorance. It's pretty much what I've come to expect from the world press.
Thank you for trying to piss in their party, but the sensationalist/ignorant here is you.
Had you properly read TFA (or the original explanation) you would have found that
- You obviously don't know WTF is Pamela
- Pamela spent around 2% of its time in the South Atlantic Anomaly
- It detected 28 protons because that's within its capabilities (protip - particle detectors don't know an atom from an anti-atom BECAUSE IT'S NEUTRAL)
- "Protons doesn't constitute matter" What, they don't have mass? Protons fit squarely in the definition of matter, unless you are being sensationalistic or forgot the definition of matter.
And by the way, try to buy 28 antiprotons from CERN and see how much they ask for it
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"amazing glowing, zapping, popping from the pure anti-matter contained in every bite!"
That would certainly give you a kick to wake you up in the morning....
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Why is little Johnny looking funny today ? A cornflake just fell through his head.
Fuel? No. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Fuel? No. (Score:4, Interesting)
You have to think of anti-matter more of a battery than an energy source. Once you have workable fusion (ie "unlimited", "cheap" power), the barriers to making anti-matter essentially go away. At that point you can make it and use it for space travel for what it is - a very compact energy source, which is exactly what you need for long journeys.
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But if antimatter is more compact, and we get to an efficiency point where antimatter gives off almost as much energy as it took to produce, then it's not such a bad deal.
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On the other hand, antimatter IIRC only releases something like ~50% of its energy in a usable manner, and even that is spread across ma
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Only around 10x better than nuclear? I would've thought 1000x better than fusion.
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You know, most of the energy sources we use today are sources that we haven't produced. We have extracted them, combined them, or chemically altered them, precisely because of the energy costs associated with outright producing them. If there's a way to harvest anti-matter without producing it, just as we have with all of our other energy sources, then it may well become a viable energy source one day.
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>You know, most of the energy sources we use today are sources that we haven't produced
Most ? Correction: all.
Basic law of physics. All the energy in the universe was already there at the big bang. We've made some of that energy do useful things, using chemical reactions and other processes to take it from some stored form of potential energy into a active energy - usually kinetic which we can then use to convert it into some other useful form (such as electric).
In the end though - every bit of energy -
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Hang on, initial detection rates have nothing to do with the actual quantities you could later harvest. Though that can usually be extrapolated, which it has in the admittedly optimistic paper on the extraction. They measure extraction in micrograms a year depending on the body being harvested and also use the collected material in conjunction with other methods to power any project.
Now I doubt it would ever become a fuel source, Im sure other means will be ready long before we could scoop up that material,
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OK, so what you are saying is that if we put CERN into orbit, capture the anti-protons, and get 28 positrons to orbit them, we have a fully working improbability drive?
And then if you go on to do 3 more impossible things that day, you can reward yourself with a nice breakfast at Milliway's.
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Juno [wikipedia.org] was launched two days ago and is expected to take five years to reach Jupiter.
New Horizons [wikipedia.org] reached Jupiter in just over two years. If it had anti-matter fuel it probably could have stopped. If it had anti-matter fuel it would have completed the trip even faster.
Really, it doesn't matter if it takes one month or one decade as long as there are enough craft in transit at one time to mainta
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Astrophysics Feed [wikipedia.org]
Planning Office (Score:5, Funny)
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Has anyone checked at the planning office to see if they are planning to put in a bypass?
Our requests for information seem to be disrupted by some as-of-yet unknown atmospheric disturbance. I'm sure they'll get back to us at their earliest convenience.
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I tried finding out and it turns out the intergalactic freedom of information act excludes beings that are not part of the council. Then again maybe it was something along the lines that they were out to lunch? My intergalactic translator was marked "as seen on TV", so I should be careful about it's use for diplomatic purposes.
Re:Planning Office (Score:5, Funny)
I did. The plans were on display, but I had to go down to the basement to find them. It was in a locked Microsoft Word document, saved on a 360 KB floppy disk, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Ponies".
OMG (Score:2)
Anti-Matter (Score:5, Funny)
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What part of "do not advertise this" is beyond your puny comprehension? - Hindmost
Not much more efficient than fusion (Score:2)
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Send Out More Harvesters! (Score:2)
We must gobble it up and hoard as much as soon as possible! We don't know what we'll do with it all we just know we need more. HURRY!
So it's DOCTOR Bruno now! (Score:4, Funny)
Good job, dude! I was wondering what you'd been up to since your work in Dr. Tongue's 3D House of Stewardesses [youtube.com]!
Take a look (Score:2)
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Not paywalled (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not paywalled (Score:4, Informative)
There's no such thing as a paywall on arXiv -- you submit full preprints to it, and paywalling isn't an option. That is the point. :-)
GOTO page 54 (Score:2)
The Belt... (Score:2)
antiparticles!? (Score:2)
If there were enough antiprotons out there to be useful as a fuel-source, any probes sent through would have come out the other side shredded to the chips. Or am I still theorizing shit?
Finally! (Score:2)
What I find interesting... (Score:2)
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The trick may be that it is big, large, and in a vacuum (relatively).
Just a wild guess.
Fuel,well maybe... (Score:3, Informative)
hmm, 28 particles in three years, maybe not. That pretty much misrepresents the full article.
From section 4:
"The factor of proportionality between the antiproton flux and the number of detected antiproton
candidates, corrected for selection efficiencies and acquisition time, is by definition the gathering
power of the apparatus.
The apparatus gathering power was calculated to be significantly
reduced with respect to the geometric factor (http://pamela.roma2.infn.it/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=256
The actual PAMELA instrument is fairly small(roughly 1.3 m x .5m) and has esentially no intake manifold.
From section 5:
During about 850 days of data acquisition (from 2006 July to 2008 December), 28 trapped
antiprotons were identified within the kinetic energy range 60–750 MeV. Events with geomagnetic
McIlwain coordinates (McIlwain 1961) in the range 1.1 L 1.3 and B 0.216 G were selected,
corresponding to the SAA. The fractional livetime spent by PAMELA in this region amounts to
the 1.7% ( 4.6 109 s).
My understanding is that that 850 days is time live for the instrument and 1.7% is percent of time in the SAA at geomagnetic ranges of interest. Right? So, 4.6X10^9 seconds works out to about 145 years. 1.7% of 850 days is 14.25 days. Quite a discreapency. Can someone else shed light?
So, you have an instrument with a very small physical intake and no collection system. Limited time at the target site as well. Given these factors, I would have to imagine that a larger more complex system could collect meaningful volumes. Might want to give that Buzzard ram scoop idea a second look.
The paper from Draper:
I like their estimations of collection rates. There should have been better treatment of power requirements vs. yeilds of the system. And, they at least could have given a nod to the Sci-Fi popularization of the same idea.
Now, lets wait too see some realistic propulsion system concepts.
Start collecting (Score:2)
Output (Score:2)
While it may be a "concept", practicality is so far away we may want to work on ESP or try deep mining for dilithium crystals first.
"Based on this and the subtraction of the solar proton contribution, the
Would Jupiter have more? (Score:3)
Jupiter's Magnetic field is supposed to be much bigger and more intense than Earth's, would it have more?
Could we use it and Saturn as some kind of anti-matter fuel depot?
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I just read that there were 38 people on board (including 19 Navy SEALS) so I don't know where those numbers came from.
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Stop being naive. The civilian research projects will all have been cut, the USA will have single A credit rating and the super rich will be paying no taxes. ;)
Hopefully it won't get that bad, but more and more it looks like it will be Russia and China getting us to Mars. The European Union may be able to make it, but it isn't really fairing much better than the USA. As for other countries, well they either don't have the budget for manned space flight or the incentive.
I want to see human space flight getti
no it's moving to non government space flight (Score:4, Interesting)
no it's moving to non government space flight.
Any way I will hate to see a cheap / corner cut china space ship fall apart mid way to mars. china 3 gorges dam may fail in real big way soon.
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> If the Chinese government can not mange themselves out of this situation they will be facing 3 billion angry citizens looking for some answers.
I'm not so sure about that. The depth of Confucian philosophy in the people of China is... extreme. Their belief in an ordered state and the nation over the individual is practically unbendable and this leaves them unwilling and unable to question their government.
Go ask a chinese exchange student at your local university what he thinks of Tiananmen Square. Most
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Proof of what. The density is very low. It poses no risk to transiting spacecraft.
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You are aware that anti-protons and protons just like anti-electrons and electrons have opposite charges? And what do opposite charges?
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You need an accelerator to get two protons to collide. Two protons have a positive charge, so they repel each other. The acceleration is necessary to overcome this repellent force. Between a proton and an anti-proton there is no repellent force. They actually attract each other.
There is absolutely no open question when it comes to matter/anti-matter annihilation. It has been done with anti-hydrogen and conta
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The only problem though is getting them to collide. While the OP is dramatically off the mark in a lot of areas, they are relatively correct in the need for acellerated streams being needed to cause particle collisions.
A microscopic chunk of antimatter in Earth's atmosphere, however, is something else entirely. It WILL get smacked with molecular collisions. (It is not likely to 'explode' so much as 'boil' though) For this reason, I do not recommend that OP inhale a balloon full of antihydrogen. Hydroge
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> the subatomic particles will not collide.
That's just wrong.
And your own analogy explains why.
In your analogy - the star from the milky way headed toward the Magellan system has gravity, so do the stars in Magellan. Gravity is an attactive force (or to be Einsteinian, the bend it produces in space-time curves TOWARD the sources) which improves the odds of a collision. It doesn't have to be on-target, if it's just close enough to one, it will curve round and strike it.
Electric charges can be both attract
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Again, as I understand it, the annihilation occurs when particles actually collide. That's actually much harder to accomplish than it sounds like.
At STP, how many times per second on average does a single molecule of O2 collide with other O2 molecules in pure O2 gas?
Yes, that's right, a fucking shit god damn epic ass-ton of times. On the order of 5x10^11. So, you bloody idiot, there are plenty of opportunities for a single atom or molecule of antimatter to be annihilated.
How many different people have to explain this to you before it begins to permeate your thick fucking head?!