347
TIL antimatter is the most expensive substance on Earth, costing $60 trillion per gram
(www.sciencefocus.com)
seems cheap to something that isn't supposed to exist.
this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
347 points (94.8% liked)
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Given the technology to create and store antimatter in quantities exceeding a handful of atoms doesn't exist, it's a bit ridiculous to extrapolate a price per gram for it.
Atoms are made-up by Big Small so they can sell you more less!
Ooh! You card read good!
Shouldn’t it cost -$60 trillion?
New infinite money glitch unlocked!
Does it even have mass like that?
Edit: should have just kept scrolling https://sopuli.xyz/comment/15894538
a handful of atoms would be a lot of atoms!
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Nearly as expensive as printer ink.
"Your printer has detected 3rd party antimatter. Please only refill with Genuine HP(tm) AntiMatter cartridges. Authorities have been notified and are enroute to your residence."
Starts printing Anti-Authorities
Anti-Authorities save lives instead of take them.
Stop posting my wish fulfillment, it's distracting. 😂
nah, they'll just let you print antimatter ink on matter paper, and then claim that the explosion was your fault for counterfeiting
Idiots, just fill a jar with matter and flip it over.
This is why it's so dangerous to go to Australia.
Planes have to stop at the equator so everyone can get their matter jars ready to switch before they convert naturally
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Genius, where can i invest in your company!?
That’s not even buying it; you’re renting it by the nanosecond.
It's a subscription model for the artificial stuff. The natural version is dirt cheap. It's always the middle man with these modern services, I tell you.
Why do people post things like this? And who cares? It doesn't matter; it antimatters.
This is just an irresponsible post.
Be careful putting matter and antimatter so close in a sentence.
You'll kill us all.
Does antimatter have mass?
Yes
The reason why it's called antimatter is because the polarity of the nucleus and electrons are reversed. There are also antineutrons that have a neutral charge. It all still has mass, but will obliterate upon contact with regular matter
There are also anti neutrons that have a neutral charge
Expanding onto this, it raises the question: how is a neutron different to an anti-neutron?
A neutron can be though of a particle composed of 2 down and 1 up quarks and lot of gluon's that keep everything together. The gluon is its own antiparticle, so the antineutron has 2 anti-down quarks, 1 anti-up quarks and gluons. This way it becomes a different particle despite also being of neutral charge.
yes, its the same as normal, its just the "Spin of the particles that are opposite", if you get down deeper, the quarks are opposite.
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(4 replies)
1 gram of antimatter stored? Forget the explosion—imagine the insurance premium on that thing.
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I thought it was HP inkjet printer cartridges? I think that's around $60 trillion per gram, isn't it?
Just wait until we start having it manufactured in a cheap labor market. The prices will plummet! It'll likely be mostly fake, but that's the price we pay for cheap antimatter.
That's so stupid: You can make antimatter at home for tree fiddy. Just buy a bunch of bananas and wait for the potassium to decay into positrons. EZ
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I didn't even know we could get a gram of anti-matter, cause don't they make it proton by proton, and they also don't exist for that long?
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Ridiculous! Tariffs on antimatter now!
With a gram of antimatter, you can probably blow a city-sized crater into Earth, so yes, 60 trillion seems like a fair price.
Edit: oh, it's only 21 kilotons. The stuff is overpriced. :)
I could snort 5 grams in one weekend, so yeah, overpriced.
My Lord, the commoners mustn’t see you so
no you wont trick me. its printer ink...
I thought element 118 was like $60 quadrillion a gram because they only manged to make like 3 atoms of it.
Edit:
- 2.05x10^21 atoms in a gram of element 118
- 5 atoms synthesized so far
Assuming they somehow managed to spend only $1 making every atom, that's $2,050,000,000,000,000,000,000 per gram.
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I bet it gets you way high
From the velocity imparted by the explosion, yes
I should think about selling some of mine.
Can we even contain it? Afaik, it's destroyed basically the instant it is created because there's regular matter everywhere.
Fun fact; the standard model actually allows for spontaneous particle-antiparticle pair generation, so long as the pair mutually annihilate within some hbar defined time limit and conservation laws aren't broken at a macro scale. This is the mechanism behind hawking radiation too; some of the energy given off by black holes is caused by spontaneous pair generation that happens such that one of the pair is created beyond the event horizon and the other member is created before the event horizon, causing one to be trapped and the other to be jettisoned into space.
I know that doesn't really relate to your comment about containing antimatter but I counter with the following: I'm profoundly autistic and the standard model has been a special interest of mine before. I couldn't resist the chance to infodump a bit
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It can be contained using magnetic fields, that has been possible since 2010: https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2010/11/17/antimatter-atoms/
Scientists are even preparing to transport it in the near future: https://glassalmanac.com/why-scientists-are-transporting-antimatter-in-a-van-uncover-the-reasons/
That's the opening scene of an X-Files episode for sure.
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