What If We Explode An Antimatter Bomb On Earth?
Well, you guys might have read the title. Yes we are going to explode things with
antimatter. Whenever it comes to something like this, I see you folks get very excited. But i
would suggest you all to please stick to more peaceful uses before starting this video. So have
you wondered whether something more powerful and destructive than a nuclear weapon exists or not?
Well yes, the destructive potential of Antimatter is simply incredible. But How
can you build an antimatter bomb and explode it? And what will be the consequences of that?
In this video we are going to fulfill your sci-fi fantasy and talk all about building and exploding
an antimatter bomb and the difficulties associated with it. And since, we at Insane curiosity love
peace we will also talk about what good use can be made of antimatter and why you should too!!
Hey, guys, just a second : If you would like to help improve the quality of our content,
please check out the Patreon link below,
we would like to say a big thank you to all those who show their support.
Antimatter is a very confusing concept for a lot of people. It seems very strange to
people. So before talking about using them to spite people lets know what exactly antimatter
is. To put it simply, antimatter is just matter with its electric charge reversed.
Antimatter was first theorized in 1928 by Paul Dirac and in 1932 it was first detected
by Carl Anderson for which he got the nobel prize. Thus humanity recognised the positron. A copy of
an electron but with a positive charge. Seems strange right, but these particles, which are
like mirror reflections of matter do exist. . Positrons are produced in the nuclear fusion
of our sun and also at particle accelerators at CERN. And when matter and antimatter meet,
they both annihilate each other while emitting powerful radiation and energy.
Only half a gram of antimatter is enough to create a bomb that would be 40 percent more powerful than
the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The Annihilation of 1 kilogram of antimatter will produce 10 billion
times more energy than 1 kilogram of TNT. This amount of antimatter would be able to break the
record set by the thermonuclear Tsar Bomba tested on Novaya Zemlya island in 1961.
But what about building the Antimatter bomb? Because before using its immense potential you
need to build it first. Did you think it's going to be easy? It seems simple though,
just introduce antimatter with matter and then BOOM!! We can already feel the excitement in you
people when you heard about the BOOM. But building an antimatter bomb isn’t so easy.
Infact its an extremely hard task. It is because Antimatter doesn't dominate our universe
and we all are made up of matter, which we should be grateful for.
But still it is present in very small quantities here and there. Rolf Landua, who is a physicist at
CERN says, “Even If you add up all the antimatter we have made in more than 30 years of antimatter
physics here at CERN, and if you were very generous, you might get 10 billionths of a gram.
Even if that exploded on your fingertip it would be no more dangerous than lighting a match.”
I see some disappointment in you guys now. In Star Trek's episode, “ Obsession” one ounce of
antimatter reacting with matter is enough to blow up half the atmosphere of an Earth-sized planet.
But that isn’t the case. As we talked earlier, antimatter is more
catastrophic than other explosives, but one ounce of antimatter isn't enough to cause such havoc
and it isn't as spectacular as science fiction portrays it. As said earlier antimatter is hard
to find and manufacture and the manufacturing cost would be millions and billions of dollars. But for
the sake of discussion let's imagine a situation where we can get our hands on an adequate amount
of antimatter. The next problem we will face is contamination. And in this case contamination
of antimatter would be fatal for us, because we cannot use normal matter made containers for it,
as they will obviously annihilate each other. So how are we going to store it?
Well antimatter in the form of charged particles can be contained in an electric field in a device
called a penning trap. Just make sure you keep the power supply on. Such a trap uses
the dipole moment of the trapped particles. In 2011, scientists at CERN were able to preserve
antihydrogen for approximately 17 minutes. The record for storing antiparticles is currently held
by the TRAP experiment at CERN: antiprotons were kept in a Penning trap for 405 days.
So this gives you enough time to unleash wrath on earth by building your bomb.
So as we talked earlier, now you have an adequate amount of antimatter and
also are able to contain it. Now it's time for you to fulfill your evil sci-fi fantasy.
So how much destruction is it going to cause? Well unfortunately, we have a reference point. The Tsar
Bomba is the most powerful nuclear device ever created, which had 60 megatons of energy, which
is equivalent to 2000 Hiroshima bombings. The destruction caused by this bomb is equivalent to a
1.5 kilogram antimatter explosion. You might wanna stand back for this. Even the aliens would think,
who does this to their own planet!! But what if you increase the quantity of antimatter-
for example 10 kilograms. This amount of antimatter would cause nearly the same destruction
as the 2004 Indian ocean earthquake whose epicentre was located off the northwestern
coast of Sumatra in Indonesia and caused the deadliest tsunami in modern history.
The magnitude of this earthquake was about 9.2. The movement of lithospheric plates created
waves with a height of more than 15 meters. The tsunami reached the shores of Indonesia Sri Lanka
southern India Thailand and many other countries killing about 300,000 people. This earthquake was
so powerful that the shockwaves from this passed through the entire planet, and the islands located
near the epicentre shifted ten’s of meters. According to theoretical models the mass shift and
huge energy release equivalent to 480 megatons of TNT slowed the Earth's rotational speed slightly
reducing the length of our day by about two point six eight microseconds. A similar force can be
expected from an explosion of only 10 kilograms of antimatter. The creation of an antimatter
bomb is only the erratic in practice obtaining anti-particles is very time-consuming, complex
and expensive undertaking the European Center for Nuclear Research or CERN, uses the Large
Hadron Collider, a charged particle accelerator to create and study antiprotons. According to the
CERN employee physicist Ralph the synthesis of one gram of antimatter with current technology would
cost about 1,000 trillion dollars, for comparison the annual u.s. budget would be enough to create
only a few micrograms of anti-matter. Another natural disaster, the biggest one that we know of
is the asteroid, (bigger than Mount Everest), that wiped off dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
If you would like to see an apocalypse, then detonate 2.5 kilotons of antimatter which will
release an energy comparable t0 100,000 Megatons of TNT and would trigger the onset of a new ice.
The hot Debris from the impact soared high into the atmosphere and beyond falling back
this debris heated the air to the temperature of the inside of an oven. A large amount of dust
fell into the atmosphere which for several years blocked the Earth's surface from the Sun causing
a nuclear winter and killing about &0% of the life on Earth. Such is the power of Antimatter.
Scientists at the University of Michigan have built a handy antimatter-gun.
Yet, although it’s called a “gun,” it isn't really a gun. In reality, it is a mini positron creator.
Instead of using the huge particle accelerator at CERN to make positrons, this device can create and
“spew short bursts of positrons.” The team at University of Michigan followed the work done
by researchers at University of Texas and built a device less than a meter long that generates both
short bursts of electrons and positrons. Though the emissions last just 30 femtoseconds,
they produce quadrillions of positrons. This number is comparable to the ones created at CERN.
With The emissions from these guns, you cannot do harm to your colleagues at work.
But the emissions are very similar to what makes up the jet streams from black holes and pulsars.
By studying how the device works, questions about the energy composition
and how the particles in the streams interact with outside environments can be answered.
But as we said in the beginning, let’s stick to more peaceful uses. So, what better use
of antimatter than using it as a fuel. NASA’s interest is caused by the fact that antimatter
could be the ultimate rocket fuel. Antimatter is also an ideal super efficient fuel an antimatter
engine would be the most efficient ever created because 100% of the mass of the substance and
antimatter is converted to energy. The current estimate is that antimatter could get us to Mars
in 6 weeks, as predicted by the design team at Penn State. The benefits of using this as a fuel
are immense. With just a tiny amount of antimatter we can set-off a nuclear reaction also know as,
ANtimatter Initiation Microfusion. Theoretically apart from being a great catalyst for our bomb,
it can also be used as spacecraft fuel. Matter-antimatter annihilation releases the most
energy per unit mass of any known reaction in physics. A spacecraft powered by this method would
require as little as one microgram of antimatter, varying according to the length of the mission.
The process is super-efficient. The energy released when matter and antimatter collide
is about ten billion times the amount released by traditional hydrogen and oxygen combustion.
There has been a design of antimatter storage rings proposed by the scientists at Penn state.
This design can be used in building modern day spacecrafts. The entire
antimatter engine itself would consist of a few components including a magnetic feed system, a
magnetic rocket nozzle thruster and storage rings. The only obstacle to the creation of mega powerful
weapons or fuel is the inability to synthesize antimatter in large volumes. For all the time
spent on these efforts people have only created an insignificant and small dose 19 nanograms of anti
particles this is barely enough to boil a cup of coffee. But if we learn to capture more antimatter
from space, it will present a new obstacle for us. The consequences of such a technology, if it
falls in the hands of a terrorist organisation can be fatal for humanity. This presents tremendous
opportunities for the future. And it will be interesting to see how we use the technology and
whether science prevails peacefully or blows up in our face!! Discussing this as a sci-fi fantasy
is a different thing, but what if we are able to harness the energy of antimatter? Will this
someday destroy us or become the strongest energy catalyst for our development as a species. Let us
know what you think in the comments section below. Also make sure to like our video and subscribe to
our channel,a s it encourages us to keep making amazing videos like this for you. Thank you.