# Why antimatter costs $63 trillion dollars to produce | Don Lincoln and Lex Fridman

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Lex Clips
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vEyGD5NdQQ
- **Дата:** 04.06.2026
- **Длительность:** 9:24
- **Просмотры:** 16,646

## Описание

Lex Fridman Podcast full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M3Vdl6DRkU
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Don Lincoln is a particle physicist at Fermilab who has spent decades working at the frontiers of high energy physics.

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## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vEyGD5NdQQ) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

I would love to take a bit of a tangent on that topic because I went down a rabbit hole watching some of your videos on antimatter and I mean Firmeny Lab was the hub for the production of antimatter for quite a while. — It was — I saw that NASA said that the global estimate for the current rate of production of antimatter is one nanog per year. Can you speak to how hard was it to make antimatter? And also, you did mention in a video that, you know, if matter and antimatter meet, they produce a lot of energy. — Mhm. — I think 20 g of antimatter is equivalent to a 1 megaton nuclear warhead in terms of explosive energy. Yeah. So, all those questions together. So, how hard is it to produce antimatter? — It's freaking hard. Okay. All right. So, here's the deal. So at the time until 2011, Firmay Lab was the most powerful anti-roton production facility on the planet. Every 2. 3 seconds, we would smash 10^ the 13 protons into a target and we would get out 10 to the 8th anti-roton. So basically in order to get a single anti-roton we needed to smash 100,000 protons into material. So every 2. 3 seconds we would get of order 10 to the 8th anti-roton. And what we would do is we would collect them over the course of 12 hours or so. And we would get in the end we would have to collect them and cool them down and so forth of order 10 the 12th anti-roton every 12 to 24 hours. So 10 the 12th sounds like a lot. It really does. That is a trillion. But you need to remember that a gram of antimatter is 10^ the 23 antirotons. So that means over the course of a day we were able to create something like 100 billionth of a gram. And so if we did that for a year then that would be about a nanogram. So about a nanogram a year give or take. That's a reasonable estimate. So a nanog one billionth of a gram. So that means at that rate with that facility it would take a billion years running with very little downtime to make a single gram of antimatter. If you combine 1 g of antimatter and one g of matter together, the energy release is equivalent to the combined Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions. So that tells you if you wanted a megat ton, you need about 25 times more. So you would have to run for 25 billion years to get a megat ton of explosive power. — Let me uh lay it all out because I think it's pretty interesting actually. This is a NASA estimate of how much it cost to produce antimatter. So looking at all the cost of the accelerator, all everything combined together to do enough for a one megaton anti-atter bomb of such a thing would be even possible on the order of 25 g like we mentioned — will cost about based on the NASA estimate — uh $1. 5 quadrillion. — By the way, uh NASA wasn't talking about a bomb. It's just me adding NASA was talking about the estimate the cost of 62 to63 trillion per gram of antihydrogen actually is what they're referring to. Uh so compared I was looking at estimates the current best estimates how much it takes to produce a 1 megaton nuclear warhead everything combined is about 10 to$50 million in the United States. So you're talking about difference in terms of a weapon with equal power $50 million versus $1. 5 quadrillion. To me what's interesting weapons is just one uh indication of this. One other possibility and NASA also writes about this is the use of antimatter and propulsion systems — right — uh just like you can use uh nuclear fusion and maybe even nuclear fusion down the line in propulsion systems. I saw that one gram can help get us to Alpha Centauri star system if we can get to 0. 2 times the speed of light in 20 years. Uh meaning it would take us 20 years to get to Alpha Centauri. Is any of this a possible future? The use of antimatter for generation of energy because we should mention that it's extremely compact. It has the obvious downsides that it's extremely costly to produce. We don't know how to do that kind of scale. — The upside is it's compact. It's — very powerful. So the short answer is it

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vEyGD5NdQQ&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 09:00)

is not a physics problem. It's an engineering problem. So I have people for that. Okay. Um okay. But no um the truth is that antimatter if you are able to uh assemble it and store it. Sure. It would be able to take that antimatter, heat up matter and shoot it out the back of a rocket and it would, you know, do what rockets do and it would make us go quick and that would be fine. — And we should mention the thing that you just mentioned is correct. One of the hugest challenges is the containment — because antimatter when it comes in contact with matter — is a problem, — right? So if you were unable to uh to contain your trip to Alpha Centuri for even a millionth of a second, boom. And that would not be good. — Yeah. — Um you know, it reminds me of the uh the Star Trek where Scotty saying, "Captain, you know, the antimatter pods are about, look, we're losing containment going to blow. " And that's exactly what would happen. So the short answer is yes. antimatter as in principle we could make and use as a source of energy, but there are probably far less expensive sources of energy. Um, you know, it depends on what you need to do. The Voyager probes are still chugging along with plutonium now. They're running out of energy at this point, but we could, you know, presumably do a somewhat better job if we needed to. So, I like the idea of antimatter, you know, but the reality is the danger, not the obvious danger of weapons, but the danger of if you wanted to be in a ship run by antimatter, if it ever got loose, well, you would never know it. That would be that. — The reason I I find this kind of inspiring is antimatter in this space of physics that has a lot of mysteries. There's a lot of exploration to be done. And so this kind of connection to energy means that uh if we have a bunch of breakthroughs on the antimatter side that might lead to a better propulsion system, better energy generation systems — in principle. — There's some combination of engineering here, but understanding the fundamental physics. — I mean we know how to do this. You know we know you take energy, you make antimatter. You have to contain it. You have to store do all the hard things. But I would be shocked if there was some like new addition to the theory that made antimatter production easier. — Interesting. So, we know how to produce antimatter with accelerators. You're saying there's not breakthroughs in physics that could lead to different mechanisms for the generation of antimatter. — You have to concentrate energy. That's it. If there's another way to concentrate energy, that would work too. — And our best knowledge of how to concentrate energy is the accelerator. — And remember, we're talking concentrating it into um volumes the size of a proton. I mean, if you concentrate it to the size of your thumb, well, then you know, it's really the density that matters, the local density. And so, when you smash two protons together, all of that's occurring in a tiny volume. So, it's the local density of energy that matters. If you had a lot of energy in a thimble or something, — it's probably not dense enough. You know, it really has to be in close proximity for that to happen. And then when it does, it it's okay. So if there's another way, we know how to do it to make that density thing with accelerators. If someone has a bright idea on how to make highly dense energy then yeah uh making antimatter is a piece of cake but that's the crux concentrated energy. — Yeah. And how to do so in a cost efficient manner not trillions of dollars. Well, yeah.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/52265*