Very tough engineering problem. Amount transported is 92 atoms. A mole (1 gram) of anti-hydrogen is 6.23x10^23 atoms.

When I visited CERN, they mentioned that there were some large number of protons in the ring at a time, and the runs would last a significant amount of wall clock time. (Don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think it was like 10^19 atoms of H, and days of wall clock)

The upshot was, it was likely that less than a mol of hydrogen had been run through the ring.

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d_silin 4 hours ago | parent [-]

If humanity doesn't perish in the next hundred year and masters interplanetary spaceflight, antimatter drive is the logical next step in propulsion after fusion.

Interstellar spaceflight will become (barely) feasible once spaceships can reach velocity between 0.02 to 0.1c are possible. Even assuming non-100% conversion efficiency, antimatter has enough energy density to provide this capability.

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TheOtherHobbes an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Interstellar flight is a new physics problem, not a smash-the-tiny-rocks-together-to-make-bigger-bang problem.

We're not going anywhere without a revolution in our understanding of the universe.

	▲	d_silin 24 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You don't need new physics for interstellar spaceflight - 16 km/s of dV is enough. you don't even need to go that much faster to slowly spread among the stars. There are a lot of smaller bodies all the way from Sun to Alpha Centauri. As long as you hop between them within reasonable time in a few thousand years you can become a true interstellar civilization, while going at much-slower-than-light velocity (similar to Polynesian colonization of Pacific).
	▲	inetknght 26 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not with that attitude, we're not!

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JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> antimatter drive is the logical next step in propulsion after fusion

Maybe. Beamed propulsion makes a hell of a lot more sense in the solar system.