[bovermyer]

From a layman's point of view, I'm more interested in antimatter's potential as a weapon.

Not necessarily because I want to use it, but because I have a vague idea of what it's capable of, and what that would mean in the hands of certain groups capable of producing it.

[pfdietz]

The big advantage of nuclear weapons is they are very cheap per unit of energy yield. Bang for the buck, if you will.

Antimatter production is so inefficient that they will be much more expensive per unit energy yield.

[garciasn]

There are a lot of completely random statements about how much a gram costs floating around out there. Anywhere from $60T to $3,000T.

According to, Michael Doser, a prominent particle physicist at CERN, "one 100th of a nanogram [of antimatter] costs as much as one kilogram of gold."

S: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-02-19/antimatter-fa...

[thaumasiotes]

> According to, Michael Doser, a prominent particle physicist at CERN, "one 100th of a nanogram [of antimatter] costs as much as one kilogram of gold."

Those aren't comparable costs. The cost given for antimatter is the cost of producing it from nothing. The cost given for gold is the market price of buying gold that already exists.

Consider the cost of producing one kilogram of gold from nothing.

(Consider also the cost of ownership. Gold has a higher-than-average cost of ownership; you have to provide security or it will be stolen. Antimatter's cost of ownership is far, far beyond that.)

[adrianN]

The relevant cost for the buyer is how much they need to pay to obtain the object. So far we haven't discovered any primordial antimatter deposits that we could mine, so creating it from scratch is the only way.

[garciasn]

Please do take it up w/Doser from CERN and/or the author of the source article; I just was parroting what he was quoted as saying.

[ReptileMan]

Not that great. Chances are you will destroy your country before you destroy some other.

[mastersummoner]

That's just an engineering problem as well.

[everforward]

It’s a fundamentally different and riskier paradigm. Nuclear weapons at rest are inert, and can even be disarmed. If the lock falls off the gate at the compound, the nukes won’t spontaneously explode.

Antimatter is always “armed” and is only rendered safe by containment. If containment fails, it explodes. It’s more like keeping a massive stockpile of fluorine, but somehow worse and harder to contain.

[fragmede]

Not to be dramatic, but wouldn't that level of destruction threaten all life on Earth? After the immediate destruction of the first county, extreme climate change would cause the same kind of problems as nuclear winter would, no?

[TheOtherHobbes]

Antimatter bombs are not a realistic technology. Aside from the unsolved technical issues - many, and fatal - no country has the GDP needed to make 1g of antimatter, which would make an explosion around 40kT.

We can't afford to blow up ourselves that way.

There are plenty of other ways we can afford, so antimatter isn't top of anyone's worries.

[drfloyd51]

But they were wrong and we were right!