The starship Enterprise, well-known to fans of the “Star Trek” series, is shown to be using an amazingly futuristic technology called warp drive. Antimatter delivers all the energy to the ship’s team that needs to warp its orbit around the complete galaxy.
Still, it looks so funny that people usually query if an antimatter idea could be adapted to power a spacecraft. It seems that science is positively sound, but unusual barriers unquestionably stand in the way of applying such a dream energy source into a practical reality.
What Is antimatter?
Science has predicted that the origin of the Enterprise’s power is a pure reaction. The matter is the “stuff” of stars, planets, and us. The matter is built up of protons, electrons, and neutrons.
The opposition of matter is Antimatter, apparently a “mirror” matter. It’s formed of particles that are, individually, antiparticles of the different building blocks of matter, such as positrons and antiprotons. These antiparticles of the different building blocks of matter are alike in various ways to their regular matter counterparts, except that they hold the hostile charge. If these antiparticles are drawn together with regular matter particles in some kind of container, the result would be a large discharge of power – presumably an eruption. Probably, that power could energize a starship.
Creation of antimatter
Nature produces antiparticles, apparently, not in huge numbers. Antiparticles are produced naturally as well as through experiential means, such as in big particle accelerators in high-energy impacts. Various recent investigations have found that antimatter is conceived generally above storm clouds.
It would need extensive amounts of heat and energy for the making of antimatter, such as during supernova or the sun. We are nowhere near being able to emulate those massive amounts of heat and energy.
Antimatter technology
It is more necessary to do the task of getting sufficient antimatter to do the job than seizing energy. First, we need to have sufficient antimatter. Gaining a significant quantity of antimatter to maintain a reactor, which is a major difficulty. While scientists have created small amounts of antimatter, they haven’t been in significant enough amounts to power much of anything.
If scientists were to gather all the antimatter that has been created artificially, when merged with regular matter, it would only light a regular light bulb for a few minutes.
Concerns? The cost of preparing this task would be astonishingly high. Particle accelerators acquire a lot of costs to operate, even to produce a small amount of antimatter in their collisions. You might be astonished to know that it would require around $25 billion to only produce one gram of positrons. To produce a single gram of antimatter, researchers at CERN estimated out that it would take $100 quadrillion and 100 billion years of running their accelerator.
The future of antimatter
As improvements in technology resemble to come around and we start to understand better how antimatter is created, scientists can start to develop ways of obtaining the elusive particles that are naturally created. So, it’s simply impossible that we could one day have energy sources like those of Antimatter as described in science fiction.