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The most expensive substance on Earth “costs $62 trillion for just one gram” and it would require 100 billion years to produce just one gramme of it.
The majority of people would incorrectly believe that gold or diamonds are the most expensive materials in the world.
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Anyone who has ever watched a cooking show would also believe it to be saffron, which we are constantly told by beaming TV chefs is “worth more than gold, don’t ya know!,” but that is also not the case.
Given that the 2009 Tom Hanks film Angels and Demons, which is based on the Dan Brown novel, was released well over a decade ago and was, let’s face it, quite forgettable, you may have accidentally seen it without noticing it or remembering it.
Antimatter, which is essentially identical to regular matter except that it has the opposite electric charge, is actually the most expensive substance in the universe.
In Angels and Demons, we discovered how everything goes boom if it comes into contact with anything made of matter, which is to say, pretty much everything.
The two opposing forces, as you can see, do not get along.
Antimatter is incredibly uncommon, whereas ordinary matter is the most prevalent thing since.
It can only be produced using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, which contributes to its high cost.
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NASA scientists estimated in 1999 that it would cost roughly $62 trillion to produce one gramme of antimatter or antihydrogen.
And Steven Farmer, the author of the 2017 book Strange Chemistry, concurred that the cost per gramme is approximately $62.5 trillion, not accounting for inflation.
Given that the International Monetary Fund predicts that the value of the global economy will reach $104 trillion by the end of 2022, that price tag is actually very amazing.
But while being extremely pricey, this chemical is also remarkably beneficial, despite being quite unstable.
Antimatter is a fantastic energy source when used in a manner that isn’t insanely harmful.
In fact, some people think it might even power intergalactic space travel.
The positron emission tomography (PET) scanners, a type of medical imaging that doctors employ to examine certain functions like blood flow, now consume very small amounts of it.
Its high cost is entirely due to the technology used to create it, as running the CERN LHC is one pricey bad boy.
It costs nearly $1 billion to operate, with electricity alone costing $23.5 million annually, according to Science To Go.
They must reach a speed of 99.99 percent of the speed of light for the particle collision to produce antimatter.
That uses enough electricity to power a large city, so that explains the staggering power bills over at CERN.
Oh, and to create a whole gram, it’d take about 100 billion years.
Suddenly that price tag doesn’t seem so unreasonable…
