Step right up and get your Antihydrogen here!

[ShapeShifter]

Apparently those krazy scientists at CERN have discovered antimatter. But for those of us monkey-brained laypeople who cannot quite tie our shoelaces, what are the implications of this discovery, I wish to ask those megacerebral types here at CotI? Does this mean I can get rid of my dinosaur-juice-drinking metal chariot and finally get my antimatter-powered hovercar? Will world governments now get bored with the old fashioned technology of the limp-wristed thermonuke and switch things up to the sexier planet-buster bomb? Will my frozen burrito get heated any faster? What will the FUTURE be like now? Answer away!

 

[far-trader]

Yes to all your questions In 10 years...

...10 SCIENCE years. Which is a vague term that is reset every couple years for another 10 SCIENCE years.

 

[Icosahedron]

Well, I dunno what the latest news from CERN is, but AFAIK antimatter has been around longer than I have.
The short answer to your question is 'not in our lifetime'. We haven't even got fusion to breakeven yet, and that's definitely been around longer than me, and antimatter is way way behind fusion in development.
Ask me about antimatter again in 2510.

 

[Peter Schutze]

not sure how long anti-matter (protons+electrons) has been around .... I thought a couple of years already ..... but anti-electrons are decades old.

I've heard they'd created a whole (5?) gram over the course of all their experiments. might not sound like much but remember how little mass is in an individual (anti)electron

I think we are nearly at the early Ian Douglas marines series books now ..... build solar satellites around mercury to harness more power than earth uses in a decade each year to create enough AM to power a small starship on a short interstellar mission every year or so

potentially very fuel/mass efficient for the spaceship at the cost of disgustingly inefficient in power used "manufacturing" cost

 

[Thunderbolt]

The breakthrough according to an esteemed colleague who used to work at CERN is that they managed to keep the antihydrogen around in a containment field for as long as they did.

Previously, the stuff was annilhilated in an instant (relatively speaking).

Of course the press started talking about it as though it was the next big thing in energy sources, forgetting to mention the extraordinary amount of power needed to create the 38 atoms in the first place.