
Antiproton ring found around Earth - ColinWright
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128245.500-antiproton-ring-found-around-earth.html
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ChuckMcM
Presumably there are antimatter rings around Jupiter and the other gas giants
as well.

I think the interesting new things to know are 'don't let you satellite pass
through an anti-proton belt' and when cosmic rays create anti-matter it
doesn't all get instantly annihilated.

But it raises some other interesting questions, since we've seen that
lightning can create anti-matter as well [1] one has to wonder why their
aren't actual pools of anti-hydrogen around planets. Clearly the annihilation
rate is going to eat some of it, but if some can accumulate, the planets been
here a long time, where is the rest?

[1] [http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
nasa/2011/11...](http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
nasa/2011/11jan_antimatter/)

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gte910h
Isn't "billions" of anti protons an absurdly small number to talk about
spaceflight fuel. Per <http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/154104> (which looks
about right) we have 2.73 X 10^26 hydrogen atoms per pound.

An antiproton is basically an antihydrogen missing its positron.

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neutronicus
One antiproton annihilation will give you about 1 GeV. Annihilate a billion of
them, and you've got 10^18 eV. One eV is about 10^(-19) Joules. So, yeah. A
tenth of a Joule. Underwhelming.

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spullara
And the larger planets might have 27 kilowatt hours worth! Hopefully something
was lost in translation of this article from scientists to journalists.

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Produce
This is tomorrow's oil.

~~~
kragen
Not likely. The special thing about antimatter is its spectacularly high
energy density, not its abundance and easy extraction. Solar energy is
tomorrow's oil.

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Produce
It's not likely that solar is tomorrow's oil for two reasons; 1) it won't
provide orders of magnitude more energy as oil did when it was discovered and,
2) it is not a finite resource. Solar/wind/green whatever will merely allow us
to prevent a grind to a halt.

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kragen
Yes, solar will provide orders of magnitude more energy, the way oil did. This
is one of the most important facts in 21st-century politics and economics, so
it's surprising that it's so little-known.

Total world marketed energy consumption is about 500 quadrillion Btu per year,
about 17 terawatts. Total terrestrial insolation is about 130 000 terawatts.
That's almost four orders of magnitude more. It's just that, until now, it's
been more expensive than fossil fuel to extract it, with low EROEI and long
payback times. That has changed in the last decade, but really only in the
last four or five years.

It is true that it is not a particularly limited resource; the sun will
continue burning for a long time, regardless of whether we set up solar panels
or not.

