No, it isn’t any rare diamond or radioactive substances like Uranium or plutonium nor is it any kind of meteorite or rare metals or stones. What then you might ask that costs $6.5 trillion and that to for 1 Gram of that substance?
All the things mentioned above like Diamonds, Uranium, plutonium, rare metals, minerals & stones are no doubt very precious & expensive, but none the less they can still be found in quantities for use wherever required. Though these substances are not abundant, they are still available in quantities for extraction and use.
However the hardest to extract or create and hence which commands such a very high price of $6.5 trillion per gram is ‘Antimatter’. That’s $6500000000000 per gram of Antimatter.
So what exactly is Antimatter? There will be a few who know what it is and then there are those who have no clue what this substance is. So let us first figure what exactly is this substance that is ridiculously & astronomically priced.
Scientifically defined, Antimatter is a material composed of antiparticles. These have the same mass as particles of ordinary matter but have opposite charge and properties.
In layman’s terms Antimatter is the opposite of matter. We all learned about matter in school haven’t we? Antimatter is made up of equal but opposite characteristics of matter. At the time of Big Bang (as per theory), both matter and antimatter were produced in equal quantities but when matter and antimatter met, they annihilated (destroyed) each other. It is like they are Twins, one a Good twin and another an Evil twin, both destroying each other.
In the process of destroying each other, extreme amounts of high energy were released. It was only because of this energy when all matter collided with antimatter and also an imbalance of a few extra matter than there was antimatter created the early Universe and all that we now see. That means that there were a few extra matter than antimatter and hence the world what we see and live.
Now, it is technically possible that some substantial amount of antimatter may exist in some part of the universe completely isolated from its opposite, matter. We certainly see no chance of getting our hands on it in the near or distant future. However scientists have succeeded in creating antimatter during scientific experiments which may someday power Spacecrafts of the future to travel to distant Stars & Galaxies.
You all must have heard of the CERN project, an European research Organization that operates the largest physic laboratory in the World one of which is the ‘Large Hadron Collider which is a circular tunnel that is 100 meters underground and close to 27km in circumference and runs below a few countries who too are part of this project.
Without getting technical and to explain it in as simple words as possible, it is here that they blasted particles (Photons, neutrons etc) and made them collide with other particles coming from the other end till they were able to create ‘antimatter’ for a split (read millionth) second and separate it from everything else that was matter. In short the idea was to trap these antimatter before they clashed with matter (example the tunnel walls that are matter) and got destroyed. They finally were able to trap antimatter using electromagnetic fields.
The amount of antimatter so trapped were in such miniscule quantities that the theory of using antimatter for space travel remains just a theory as of now till we find out ways and means of creating antimatter in huge quantity and isolate them from any matter whatsoever.
It is because of the huge scientific importance of antimatter and the fact that it is very expensive and hard to create coupled with the fact that the amount created is very miniscule; the cost of Antimatter is $6.5 trillion per gram.
Probably in the distant future the uses of antimatter may as well exceed their exclusive use for space travel and there may come a time when antimatter engagement rings will replace diamond rings. You never know what the future holds.
