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  • So commonly when we think of the most valuable material in the world our minds tend to center onto gold and while gold is very

  • expensive at a current value of $56 per gram, there are other materials that are significantly more expensive.

  • Drugs like heroin, cocaine, and LSD for example, are the most expensive drugs in the world by sheer weight,

  • far more valuable than gold is. The market value for diamonds per gram is even more prohibitively expensive,

  • but even this is nothing compared to the most valuable material currently known to humanity:

  • Antimatter. So what even is antimatter? To put it simply,

  • antimatter is the opposite of regular matter. Down at the atomic level,

  • antimatter is made up of particles and atoms just like regular matter is. The only difference is that they have an opposite electric charge.

  • Protons and antimatter are negative and called anti-protons while electrons are positive and called positrons.

  • Whenever antimatter and matter touch one another they instantly annihilate each other in a

  • 100% efficient release of energy. This pure energy release is why antimatter could prove to be extremely useful,

  • The most efficient nuclear weapons, for example, convert a mere 7% to 10% of their mass into energy while antimatter to matter collisions release

  • 100% of their mass into energy.

  • If you somehow were carrying one gram of antimatter about the size of a raisin and dropped it on the ground,

  • it would create an explosion greater than both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki

  • nuclear explosions combined, easily enough to destroy an entire city. Smaller scale

  • assassination weapons may be more economically feasible however, like the theorized antimatter bullet, which would essentially be a regular bullet

  • but with a tiny 1 billionth of a gram of

  • positrons attached to the tip. Upon impact, the bullet fired from a rifle would be capable of destroying an entire house,

  • tank or any other similar sized object.

  • But antimatter has several other uses beyond just military ones.

  • Antiprotons have also been shown in several studies to have the potential to treat certain kinds of cancers and

  • antimatter could also be used as a fuel source for interstellar travel.

  • It is conceivable that using antimatter as a fuel source could propel a rocket with humans onboard to about 50 percent

  • of the speed of light, which is fast enough to reach the nearest star to earth in just a little over two years

  • So why haven't we created enough antimatter yet to do any of these incredible things?

  • The answer is because antimatter is incredibly rare, difficult to produce and prohibitively expensive currently

  • It appears that nearly the entire observable universe is made out of regular matter and while it is possible that there could be

  • entire galaxies made out of antimatter, we have so far not been able to detect any.

  • Antimatter is produced naturally in Earth's outer atmosphere when high-energy cosmic rays impact it.

  • But the amount produced is tiny and lasts only

  • briefly before it comes into contact with regular matter and annihilates itself. The only practical means of acquiring antimatter

  • so far have been to produce

  • it artificially ourselves, but even this method is incredibly difficult and expensive. The Large Hadron Collider

  • operated by CERN in Switzerland, for example, one of the most expensive and complicated facilities ever built is capable of producing

  • 10,000,000 antiprotons per minute when fully operational. That sounds like a lot

  • but it's actually a laughably tiny amount. To produce

  • just a single gram of antimatter at that rate of production,

  • it would take CERN roughly 100 billion years to complete. Production is only the first problem

  • though, storing it is perhaps an even larger problem since antimatter annihilates matter

  • instantly. You can't just store it in a regular container, you have to suspend the material without it coming into contact with

  • anything and so far, CERN has only succeeded in storing antimatter atoms for a record 17 minutes before they became

  • annihilated. Since just one gram is enough to obliterate an entire city, safety

  • precautions and storing the material and keeping it in safe hands would be of the utmost importance.

  • And we're not even sure how exactly we would store such a large amount in the first place

  • Estimates on how much antimatter costs to produce varies greatly. In an article written by NASA Godard in

  • 2006 a figure of 25 billion dollars per gram is cited while in another NASA paper written back in

  • 1999 a figure of sixty two point five trillion dollars per gram is cited

  • Which is about 83 percent of the entire global GDP just to produce one single gram.

  • For reference the Manhattan Project which developed the first atomic bomb cost twenty three billion dollars adjusted for inflation

  • And just like creating the atomic bomb did,

  • creating antimatter in large quantities if ever that's possible, would open up a new Pandora's box that we couldn't close once we open it.

  • We would have to live with the consequences of life in a world with abundant antimatter both positive ones and

  • negative ones. In the meantime though if you want to watch something positive and learn something new right now

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