[extropy-chat] (Link) Antihydrogen Propulsion

[Matthew Gingell]

Hara Ra writes:
 > Anyway, 1g or more antimatter is serious stuff.

 Just to add a little more perspective, a 20 megaton hydrogen bomb
 annihilates about a kilogram of matter. So macroscopic quantities of
 antimatter are indeed to be taken seriously, but short of truck loads
 not blow up the world seriously.

 Literally blowing up the world, as in generating a yield comparable
 to the gravitation binding energy of the planet and accelerating the
 residue cloud of planet Earth to escape velocity, would require a
 smidge more that a million, million tons of antimatter, eg:

  Frink
  Copyright 2000-2004 Alan Eliasen, eliasen at mindspring.com
  http://futureboy.homeip.net/frinkdocs/
  Enter calculations in the text field at bottom.
  Use up/down arrows to repeat/modify previous calculations.

  # Lower bound on GBE of Earth in Joules. 
  2.24*10^32 J
  224.00000000000000000e+30 m^2 s^-2 kg (energy)

  # Expressed as megatons * c^2
  2.24*10^32 J -> megatons c^2
  2.7473303018303695101e+6

 Though of course, short of dilithium crystals, there's no way to
 convert the whole bang into KE and in real life you mostly end up
 with heat - so rest assured boiling vapor cloud Earth abides and
 ought to congeal good as new in umpteen billion years. (Though likely
 with some rather peculiar geology and a bit more radiation than, you
 know, complex proteins are likely to find comfortable.))

 -Matt