Saturday, February 7, 2015

Will we eventually create high-speed Antimatter Spaceships?


This is such a cool subject to ponder, but if you know anything much about Star Trek, you will know that antimatter was crucial to the functioning of their starship/spaceship. Yeah, they used it to power their warp drive! Now, I doubt if we'll be going that fast using our primitive version of antimatter technology or else we might explode during the process - literally. LOL!

The basic concepts behind antimatter is that every particle has a corresponding antiparticle, which has the same mass but opposite electric charge, along with the contrasting values from its other quantum properties, etc. When a particle and its corresponding antiparticle meet, they are destroyed in a burst of energy. This is often called "pair annihilation."

There are lots of risks involved when trying to contain 'antimatter' if stored in bulk. If you make a few screw-ups during the process, then you may as well crash into a giant flaming star or at least stick your head inside of a microwave for an hour; ha! We can effectively store positrons (positive electrons) and antiprotons, for example, and there is some use for antimatter in the medical field, as well. However, the question is more about if mankind can ultimately create high-speed antimatter spaceships without the help of extraterrestrials? Personally, I think most of the cool aliens use some type of crystal technology and zero point energy devices to power their crafts and flying saucers, but that is another subject entirely. 

Actually, in all seriousness, extraterrestrial beings that can travel to planet Earth from light years away probably use more than that. They most likely have the ability to create artificial wormholes to drastically shorten the gap from point A to point B within the cosmos. If you look at the universe and the space-time continuum existing simultaneously as one, like a giant web, it would be like pulling a certain section of a spider web (with it still staying intact, of course) closer to the vessel (spaceships, in this case) of transport so it could quickly warp across the intricacies of a standard vacuum of 4-dimensional existence, all at once.  I'm not saying that we still shouldn't create high-speed antimatter mediums of transport, just that the fabrication of wormholes might be a breakthrough discovery in the distant future (maybe another million years; ha!). However, even with all that gobbledygook I just spewed outward, if the aliens could achieve this, I'm still puzzled at how they could prevent collisions from space debris unless they have highly advanced radar beams that can also project into space at a rate that would superimpose the same rate of travel via the wormholes. Wait a minute... What? Maybe I should just ask Bob Lazar, instead. Okay, so much for my hypothesis; back to the drawing board...

If you'd like to read a couple related articles about this subject, I found some decent resources online:
www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/12/antimatter-fusion-spaceships-interstellar-nasa_n_1876760.html
www.nasa.gov/exploration/home/antimatter_spaceship.html

Update (4-20-2022): I recently read an article entitled "Nasa invents 'revolutionary' material 1,000 times better than state-of-the-art spaceship alloys." Anyway, a brief snippet of that post is: "Nasa scientists have invented a new metal alloy that is 1,000 times more durable than current state-of-the-art materials used in aviation and space exploration. The US space agency believes that Alloy GRX-810 could revolutionize space travel, as it can withstand far harsher conditions than existing materials used within rocket engines. The material has twice the strength, three-and-a-half times the flexibility and more than 1,000 times the durability under stress at high temperatures." You can read more about that, here: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/nasa-invents-revolutionary-material-1000-times-better-than-state-of-the-art-spaceship-alloys/
I know this update doesn't necessarily relate to whether we will eventually create high-speed antimatter spaceships or not, but at least it sounds like progress of some sorts. Either way, we will need better alloys for our spaceships if we are to advance toward such things, especially if we don't get to borrow extraterrestrial technology. Oh wait, maybe we have... Ha! Just kidding, I guess. At any interstellar rate, only time will tell.
---End of Update

Image Credit: It is in the Public Domain because it was solely created by NASA.

---End of Post "Will we eventually create high-speed Antimatter Spaceships?"

No comments:

Post a Comment