obviously it's not relevant to our interests for probably hundreds of years still, but it's a very conceptually simple proposition:
1. antimatter is incredibly energy dense, so would be an excellent fuel.
2. there's essentially none of it sitting around, so we need to make it, which takes lots of energy, but that's fine - it's an energy transport system, not an energy production system.
3. just set up square kilometers of solar panels in orbit around the sun or Mercury, use them to power particle accelerators which produce antimatter.
the sun emits enormous amounts of energy - we don't need some magic new energy source, just magic new ways to temporarily bundle up energy in a dense form.
edit: someone did the maths[0]:
Where will we get the energy to run these magic matter factories? Some of the prototype factories will be built on Earth, but for large scale production we certainly don’t want to power these machines by burning fossil fuels on Earth. There is plenty of energy in space. At the distance of the Earth from the Sun, the Sun delivers over a kilowatt of energy for each square meter of collector, or a gigawatt (1,000,000,000 watts) per square kilometer. A collector array of one hundred kilometers on a side would provide a power input of ten terawatts (10,000,000,000,000), enough to run a number of antimatter factories at full power, producing a gram of antimatter a day.
from TFA:
Preliminary mission analysis:
- 10 kg instrument payload could be sent to 250 AU in 10 years using 30 mg of anti-H
- A similar probe could be sent to Alpha Centauri in 40 years using grams of anti-H
Comments
obviously it's not relevant to our interests for probably hundreds of years still, but it's a very conceptually simple proposition:
1. antimatter is incredibly energy dense, so would be an excellent fuel.
2. there's essentially none of it sitting around, so we need to make it, which takes lots of energy, but that's fine - it's an energy transport system, not an energy production system.
3. just set up square kilometers of solar panels in orbit around the sun or Mercury, use them to power particle accelerators which produce antimatter.
the sun emits enormous amounts of energy - we don't need some magic new energy source, just magic new ways to temporarily bundle up energy in a dense form.
edit: someone did the maths[0]:
from TFA:
[0]: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/240278/how...