This is awesome, but I do have some questions about the potential for future (explosive) superweapons. It seems to me that there is clear potential for an antimatter bomb: if there is some way to efficiently produce antimatter and contain it (in mangetic containment?) then the resulting annihilation with ordinary matter should be orders of magnitude more destructive per gram of “explosive” than a thermonuclear warhead. Many speculative space colonization frameworks often include descriptions of antimatter as an extremely mass-efficient fuel for acceleration and deceleration of Von Neuman probes, but I haven’t yet seen any arguments that point out that this technology is also a dual-use global WMD.
Are there fundamental physical constraints that make it impractical to either produce or contain antimatter for this purpose?
For antimatter bombs there’s no chain reaction, and nothing stops matter and antimatter annihilating on contact, which is why antimatter doesn’t occur in nature and why you have to manufacture it yourself, paying the full energy cost with no shortcut.
Could you build one anyway? It seems extremely tough because there’s no physical barrier to annihilation; I don’t see how you could confine macroscopic quantities by any realistic mechanism (but there’s no simple rule-out “this is impossible”). Even worse, if confinement ever failed (including, eg, someone detonating an ordinary explosive nearby) the whole thing would blow up on you.
This is awesome, but I do have some questions about the potential for future (explosive) superweapons. It seems to me that there is clear potential for an antimatter bomb: if there is some way to efficiently produce antimatter and contain it (in mangetic containment?) then the resulting annihilation with ordinary matter should be orders of magnitude more destructive per gram of “explosive” than a thermonuclear warhead. Many speculative space colonization frameworks often include descriptions of antimatter as an extremely mass-efficient fuel for acceleration and deceleration of Von Neuman probes, but I haven’t yet seen any arguments that point out that this technology is also a dual-use global WMD.
Are there fundamental physical constraints that make it impractical to either produce or contain antimatter for this purpose?
For antimatter bombs there’s no chain reaction, and nothing stops matter and antimatter annihilating on contact, which is why antimatter doesn’t occur in nature and why you have to manufacture it yourself, paying the full energy cost with no shortcut.
Could you build one anyway? It seems extremely tough because there’s no physical barrier to annihilation; I don’t see how you could confine macroscopic quantities by any realistic mechanism (but there’s no simple rule-out “this is impossible”). Even worse, if confinement ever failed (including, eg, someone detonating an ordinary explosive nearby) the whole thing would blow up on you.