Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…It was. I saw that NASA said that the global estimate for the current rate of production of antimatter is one nanogram per year. Can you speak to how hard was it to make antimatter? And also, you did mention in a video that, you know, if matter and antimatter meet, they produce a lot of energy. I think twenty grams of antimatter is equivalent to a one-megaton nuclear warhead in terms of explosive energy. Yeah, so all of those questions together. So how hard is it to produce antimatter? It’s freaking hard. Okay. All right. So here’s the deal. So at the time until two thousand and eleven, Fermilab was the most powerful antiproton production facility on the planet. Every two point three seconds, we would smash ten to the thirteen protons into a target, and we would get out ten to the eighth antiprotons. So basically, in order to get a single antiproton, we needed to smash a hundred thousand protons into material. So every two point three seconds, we would get of order ten to the eighth antiprotons. And what we would do is we would collect them over the course of twelve hours or so, and we would get, in the end, we would have to collect them and cool them down and so forth, of order ten to the twelfth antiprotons every twelve to twenty-four hours. So ten to the twelfth sounds like a lot. It really does. That is a trillion. But you need to remember that a gram of antimatter is ten to the twenty-three antiprotons. So that means over the course of a day, we were able to create something like one hundred billionth of a gram. And so if we did that for a year, then that would be about a nanogram. So about a nanogram a year, give or take. That’s a reasonable estimate. So a nanogram, one billionth of a gram, so that means at that rate, with that facility, it would take a billion years running with very little downtime to make a single gram of antimatter. If you combine one gram of antimatter and one gram of matter together, the energy release is equivalent to the combined Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions. So that tells you if you wanted a megaton, you need about 25 times more. So you would have to run for 25 billion years to get a megaton of explosive power.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.