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Proton/anti-proton Annihilation produces gamma rays and fast neutrons which can catalyze fusion. It's much more cost effective than pure annihilation because antimatter is the most expensive substance by mass. Requiring much more energy to produce than it will release.
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The most economical use for antimatter is to use microscopic amounts of it as a catalyst for other reactions. By itself it's just a really dense store of energy that costs more to create than it's annihilation will release.
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Type II civilizations can use it to store the massive amounts of energy produced by their stars. Type I civilizations can extract microscopic amounts of it from the magnetospheres of large planets. Types zeros like us can just write papers about it.
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wut? we've been making it for decades in amounts that it'd be aggrandizing to call "microscopic"
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Antiprotons or positrons? because positrons just make gamma rays, and not nearly enough to do anything useful with.
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both
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Either way, we can't make enough to be worth anything other than a research subject. Antimatter catalyzed fusion is a cool idea for space travel, but you need to already be in space to harvest antiprotons.
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the idea was antiproton annhiliation in a high-atomic mass producing neutron flux for fusion, weapon part is heat from plasma
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but without *really* strong confinement you just get a very transient plasma that cools too much too quickly to be useful
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yeah, plasma weapons in fiction that's trying to do the math tend to involve a magnetic containment packet that's kinda like... if you can induce that kind of magnetic flux at arbitrary range, why don't you just do that inside the target
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I think I'm going to have to fall back on "Aliens understand magnetoplasma dynamics better than humans do because they have inhuman mindsets and thus different cognitive biases than we do."
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Turns out that stars were sentient the whole time, they just think really slowly because they are so huge. If you worship them properly they'll give you the equations that make fusion more practical on a human scale.
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lol starfucker
End of conversation
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