Conversion Of Energy Into Mass

[Spacescifi]

 

Some theorize that the universe was created through a process of converting energy into mass.

Einstein's famous equation apparently shows that mass and energy are interchangeable.

So you can convert mass into energy, or energy into mass (harder to do apparently).

I have read that human science has on very small scales managed to turn energy into mass.

Main Question:

How much solar energy would it take to convert it to a ton of liquid hydrogen?

How long would it take to refuel at say... one light minute from the sun?

Eight light minutes (Low Earth orbit)?

Let's presume that we have scifi tech that can flawlessly convert 100% of the solar energy absorbed via black scifi solar panels into liquid hydrogen through an energy to mass converter.

 

This is at best, a scifi solution to not having enough propellant to get around the solar system.

I would bet that it could even work with starlight, but starlight is less intense and would take much longer to fuel up.

It goes with without saying that the closer one gets to the sun the faster they can refuel.

One could even coat the ships hull with the scifi panels and it would be immune to all lasers and radiant energies. At  worst it's LH tanks would burst and spill LH everywhere.

What do you think?

Bonus Questions: What kind of fundamental force manipulation would the ability to convert energy DIRECTLY into mass 100% imply?

All four forces manipulated? Or just some of them?

Edited July 29, 2020 by Spacescifi

[Kerbart]

When you split uranium into lighter elements you don’t lose protons, neutrons or electrons, but when you add up their atomic masses you’ll see that the end result of the fission process has less mass than what you started with. that difference, almost like a rounding error, so to speak, is what creates the energy that is released when atom bombs explode.

what you want to do is going up a couple of magnitudes on that scale. The amounts of energy are staggering. To create one kilogram of mass, using Einstein’s E=mc² equation, you will need c² Joules, or (299.8×10⁶)² Joules,  or 8.99×10¹⁶ Joules. It would take a very large 1000MW powerplant about 9×10⁷ seconds to produce that, or a little over 10 centuries. And that’s one kilogram; you want 1000 of those.

Edited July 30, 2020 by Kerbart
Inserted missing space; replaced "x" (on mobile) with proper ×

[Spacescifi]

5 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

When you split uranium into lighter elements you don’t lose protons, neutrons or electrons, but when you add up their atomic masses you’ll see that the end result of the fission process has less mass than what you started with. that difference, almost like a rounding error, so to speak, is what creates the energy that is released when atom bombs explode.

what you want to do is going up a couple of magnitudes on that scale. The amounts of energy are staggering. To create one kilogram of mass, using Einstein’s E=mc² equation, you will need c² Joules, or (299.8x10⁶)² Joules,  or 8.99x10¹⁶ Joules. It would take a very large 1000MW powerplant about9x10⁷ seconds to produce that, or a little over 10 centuries. And that’s one kilogram; you want 1000 of those.

 

Hmmm... what if I had a few tons of antimatter at my disposal... or is it time to throw in the towel and admit defeat already?

LOL.

[Bill Phil]

12 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

 

Hmmm... what if I had a few tons of antimatter at my disposal... or is it time to throw in the towel and admit defeat already?

LOL.

If you have antimatter you’ve already created matter - the process that creates antimatter also creates matter. 

And this process is incredibly inefficient.

[SOXBLOX]

Two words: Baryon Conservation. Too lazy to see ifsomeone pointed this out.

[Guest]

Creation of matter from energy is exactly how antimatter is made. In fact, due to law of baryonic number conservation, you always have to create an equal amount of matter and antimatter. For every antihydrogen atom you make, you also make one normal hydrogen. It's not possible to make an antimatter factory that would be more than 50% efficient. You may try fusing the normal hydrogen into heavier elements to get back some of energy wasted in making it, but you'll only get a tiny fraction out of that. 

[Nuke]

synthesis of some elements involves taking a lighter element and making a heavier one exists. if taken to extremes we can do things like validate existing theoretical elements or potentially make new ones if the island of stability can be achieved. but you are usually just fusing up lighter elements. you are just moving around existing particles, not creating any new ones. im not sure how you go about creating the required quarks out of thin air. 

then one has to debate the existence of particles in the standard model. aren't they all effectively quantum fields? matter and energy are effectively the same. wheres a qft guy when you need em?

Edited July 30, 2020 by Nuke

[Spacescifi]

18 minutes ago, Nuke said:

synthesis of some elements involves taking a lighter element and making a heavier one exists. if taken to extremes we can do things like validate existing theoretical elements or potentially make new ones if the island of stability can be achieved. but you are usually just fusing up lighter elements. you are just moving around existing particles, not creating any new ones. im not sure how you go about creating the required quarks out of thin air. 

then one has to debate the existence of particles in the standard model. aren't they all effectively quantum fields? matter and energy are effectively the same. wheres a qft guy when you need em?

 

I was wrong, they have not converted any energy to mass yet apparently.

There was an experiment in 2014 that basically was a proof of concept or something.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2018-03-underway.amp

Now they are underway to attempt to play God on a small scale and create mass from not nothing... but something.

Because light is something. All light comes from mass, so it does not seem too weird that we may be able to invert the process somehow.

Basically this is like taking a piece of fried chicken and turing it into a hatchable egg.

Hard. Even seems like straight up god-tier LOL.

Edited July 30, 2020 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

5 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Some theorize that the universe was created through a process of converting energy into mass.

They lie. The "mass" is just a vulgar XIX-centurish nickname for two values:
1) energy-to-momentum ratio
2) coefficient of the local "time-space curvature"
It can't be created. Nothing makes this value even to exist.

[Codraroll]

10 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Main Question:

How much solar energy would it take to convert it to a ton of liquid hydrogen?

How long would it take to refuel at say... one light minute from the sun?

Eight light minutes (Low Earth orbit)?

Let's presume that we have scifi tech that can flawlessly convert 100% of the solar energy absorbed via black scifi solar panels into liquid hydrogen through an energy to mass converter.

Doing this at Earth orbit because that's the easiest figure to work with. Assume sunlight: 1kW/m² (good enough for an approximation)

Required energy: 1000 *c² Joules (per @Kerbart's post). That's c² kilowatt-seconds. And you're getting one kilowatt-second per second per square meter of solar panel.

c² = 9 * 10¹⁶. A very big number. But of course, it represents kilowatts multiplied by seconds. If you're not in a hurry, you can have a small energy source and take a lot of seconds.

Assume you want the tanking to be done in a year. Since we're already playing fast and loose with the accuracy of numbers here, let's approximate a year to 10 000 seconds. Or 10⁴ seconds.

This means you need your solar array to be 9*10¹² m². Let's round that up to 10¹³ m², to give room for some gaps between the panels.

10¹³ m² is ... kinda big. We can knock off a few zeroes of the figure by converting to square kilometers instead. 10⁶ m² to one km², that gives ... 10⁷ km². Ten million square kilometers (well, nine million, if we revert that rounding up we did earlier). That's roughly the size of Canada. Realistically, to account for various losses and inefficiencies, you could need ten times that.

10 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Hmmm... what if I had a few tons of antimatter at my disposal... or is it time to throw in the towel and admit defeat already?

LOL.

Get the towel ready. Creating "a few tons" of antimatter requires "a few times" more energy than creating one ton of matter. You seem strangely fixated on using antimatter as an energy source, but it's a very dead end. Creating it takes, at the very best, as much energy as you're getting out of it, and you're going to need a whole lot of energy to store it without blowing everything to bits. 

And of course, after pouring those 10¹⁷ Joules into creating one ton of hydrogen, assuming you bring your oxygen and burn it, you'll get ... approximately 10¹¹ Joules of energy out of it, if my math is correct. A year of tanking for a total fuel efficiency of one ten-thousandth of a percent. "Folly" doesn't even begin to cover it.

[Guest]

Actually, antimatter is pretty great... an an energy storage device. Nothing wrong with it in that application, however as there's not all that much naturally occurring antimatter, it needs to be manufactured somewhere, and that requires getting energy from somewhere else. That said, a large antimatter factory powered by a large-scale fusion plant (for example, a platform floating inside a gas giant and fusing its atmosphere) could be more economical than multiple small fusion reactors.

This is actually similar situation that we have with proposals of hydrogen economy right now. Lacking viable fusion power, we an only get energy from it by burning it, but most hydrogen on Earth is already "burned", that is, in water. That's why fossil fuels are currently the primary hydrogen source. The only way to change that would be to switch the world over to nuclear power and make it from water, basically "unburning" it.

[Hannu2]

1 hour ago, Codraroll said:

Doing this at Earth orbit because that's the easiest figure to work with. Assume sunlight: 1kW/m² (good enough for an approximation)

Required energy: 1000 *c² Joules (per @Kerbart's post). That's c² kilowatt-seconds. And you're getting one kilowatt-second per second per square meter of solar panel.

c² = 9 * 10¹⁶. A very big number. But of course, it represents kilowatts multiplied by seconds. If you're not in a hurry, you can have a small energy source and take a lot of seconds.

Assume you want the tanking to be done in a year. Since we're already playing fast and loose with the accuracy of numbers here, let's approximate a year to 10 000 seconds. Or 10⁴ seconds.

This means you need your solar array to be 9*10¹² m². Let's round that up to 10¹³ m², to give room for some gaps between the panels.

10¹³ m² is ... kinda big. We can knock off a few zeroes of the figure by converting to square kilometers instead. 10⁶ m² to one km², that gives ... 10⁷ km². Ten million square kilometers (well, nine million, if we revert that rounding up we did earlier). That's roughly the size of Canada. Realistically, to account for various losses and inefficiencies, you could need ten times that.

Get the towel ready. Creating "a few tons" of antimatter requires "a few times" more energy than creating one ton of matter. You seem strangely fixated on using antimatter as an energy source, but it's a very dead end. Creating it takes, at the very best, as much energy as you're getting out of it, and you're going to need a whole lot of energy to store it without blowing everything to bits. 

And of course, after pouring those 10¹⁷ Joules into creating one ton of hydrogen, assuming you bring your oxygen and burn it, you'll get ... approximately 10¹¹ Joules of energy out of it, if my math is correct. A year of tanking for a total fuel efficiency of one ten-thousandth of a percent. "Folly" doesn't even begin to cover it.

Moreover, practical conversion ratio from energy to matter is ridiculously low. Particle accelerators consume tens of MW and produced nanograms in year.

11 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

 

Hmmm... what if I had a few tons of antimatter at my disposal... or is it time to throw in the towel and admit defeat already?

LOL.

I think that if you call that antimatter "waste" as product and that regular hydrogen as waste you increase your company's profits by incredible many orders of magnitude. Otherwise I wonder what is the cost of disposing antimatter waste in municipal recycling plant. For some reason it is not mentioned in their catalog.

[Codraroll]

4 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Actually, antimatter is pretty great... an an energy storage device. Nothing wrong with it in that application, however as there's not all that much naturally occurring antimatter, it needs to be manufactured somewhere, and that requires getting energy from somewhere else. That said, a large antimatter factory powered by a large-scale fusion plant (for example, a platform floating inside a gas giant and fusing its atmosphere) could be more economical than multiple small fusion reactors.

This is actually similar situation that we have with proposals of hydrogen economy right now. Lacking viable fusion power, we an only get energy from it by burning it, but most hydrogen on Earth is already "burned", that is, in water. That's why fossil fuels are currently the primary hydrogen source. The only way to change that would be to switch the world over to nuclear power and make it from water, basically "unburning" it.

The problem with storing energy as antimatter is that you have to work very hard to contain it, and with one little screw-up you can kiss your bum goodbye. Any small containment failure will unleash enough energy to ruin the containment device, thus creating a very large containment failure and making your ship (or station, or city) a short-lived star. Antimatter storage is like storing hydrogen if hydrogen spontaneously combusted upon contact with anything including the tank it was kept in, only a million times worse because that's roughly how much more energy it releases.'

In short, if you have the technology to reliably create and store a lot of antimatter, you probably have better options for your energy creation needs.

[K^2]

12 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

They lie. The "mass" is just a vulgar XIX-centurish nickname for two values:
1) energy-to-momentum ratio
2) coefficient of the local "time-space curvature"
It can't be created. Nothing makes this value even to exist.

The curvature bit is more complicated, because there are shear terms in the tensor, so even with a choice of coordinate system, you can't just reduce space-time curvature to energy/mass density alone. In general, how that mass/energy moves is important. Rotating black holes are a great example.

Another caveat is that you're spot on about nomenclature being outdated. Early relativity papers still used the word "mass" to denote inertial mass, and that's where we get mass-energy equivalence from, which is the topic. But modern scientists almost never mean that when they say "mass". Instead, they're talking about rest mass, which is the pole in the propagator of the particle field. Rest mass can be created, provided you have sufficient energy to do so, which is why there is confusion. Two historically related, yet completely different meanings of the word "mass" being mixed together into one discussion.

[Spacescifi]

5 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Actually, antimatter is pretty great... an an energy storage device. Nothing wrong with it in that application, however as there's not all that much naturally occurring antimatter, it needs to be manufactured somewhere, and that requires getting energy from somewhere else. That said, a large antimatter factory powered by a large-scale fusion plant (for example, a platform floating inside a gas giant and fusing its atmosphere) could be more economical than multiple small fusion reactors.

This is actually similar situation that we have with proposals of hydrogen economy right now. Lacking viable fusion power, we an only get energy from it by burning it, but most hydrogen on Earth is already "burned", that is, in water. That's why fossil fuels are currently the primary hydrogen source. The only way to change that would be to switch the world over to nuclear power and make it from water, basically "unburning" it.

 

Very nice.

I think human technology advances not only interationally, but also based on access.

Like once we get access to the gas giants with our nuclear machines, THEN our space propulsion systems will advance much farther.

Like you said, resources can either grow or inhibit tech advancement.

Edited July 30, 2020 by Spacescifi

[Guest]

Well, this is true sometimes, but remember, gas giants are only relevant when fusion technology is available, since both deuterium and helium-3 are great for that purpose, but they're of no use if we can't figure out fusion. 

26 minutes ago, Codraroll said:

In short, if you have the technology to reliably create and store a lot of antimatter, you probably have better options for your energy creation needs.

Creation, yes (because you can't create energy with antimatter, anyway). Storage, no, because it's the most mass-efficient way to store energy, plain and simple. It may also be the most volume-efficient, assuming the containment gear is not huge. For things where this matters, like spacecraft and weapons, this is the best choice there can be. 

Storage requires a lot of energy, and moving antimatter out of a container is not a straightforward operation, but his can be neatly solved with a single solution: make each container a reactor. In low-power mode, it would just power itself, and when connected to something, it would increase the reaction rate to power that, too. If made study enough, the main failure mode would be running out of antimatter, at which point it would not be dangerous anymore.  Also, that would solve several problems with starting and shutting down (since you don't do these things) and also help with designing the power generation component, since it would have an assured minimum load.

Also, safety depends on how much antimatter such a reactor contains. If you can miniaturize this into microgram scale, it won't be worse than a tank of gasoline exploding. I wouldn't power a smartphone with that, even if such a device would fit inside (and it might, a microgram is a really tiny amount), but it is certainly well within what military and industry handles on a daily basis. The thing with antimatter is that you don't really need a whole lot, the only place where you'd encounter "tons" of it powering one thing is an interstellar starship with a beam core engine.

[Bill Phil]

5 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Creation, yes (because you can't create energy with antimatter, anyway). Storage, no, because it's the most mass-efficient way to store energy, plain and simple. It may also be the most volume-efficient, assuming the containment gear is not huge. For things where this matters, like spacecraft and weapons, this is the best choice there can be. 

That may not be the case depending on the technology available. Certain particles in certain theories of particle physics can essentially convert mass directly into energy - no antimatter required. 

[Spacescifi]

1 hour ago, Bill Phil said:

That may not be the case depending on the technology available. Certain particles in certain theories of particle physics can essentially convert mass directly into energy - no antimatter required. 

Does it require absurd power requirements?

Then again... it might not. If not, then we may STILL not have sustained fusion, but we can sure as well do pulse propulsion via whatever new subatomic shenanigans we get up to... without nuclear perhaps.

What about energy into matter?

[K^2]

1 hour ago, Bill Phil said:

That may not be the case depending on the technology available. Certain particles in certain theories of particle physics can essentially convert mass directly into energy - no antimatter required. 

Black holes do that in all theories. Exactly how they manage it varies from theory to theory, but any black hole can convert up to 100% of mass it consumes into massless energy (photons). But the fact that they have to do that is just consequence of General Relativity, which is just a consequence of space-time symmetries. I mean, technically, that's also a theory, but we have better confirmation of that than Earth being a spheroid, so there is very little doubt that provided we have access to a black hole, we can generate energy with it.

[wumpus]

On 7/29/2020 at 9:14 PM, Spacescifi said:

I was wrong, they have not converted any energy to mass yet apparently.

Any antimatter physicists have experimented on was created from energy, typically almost immediately before observation (although I think positrons have been confined for measurable periods of time since the 1980s).  Dirac's (and Schrödinger's) Nobel prize came shortly after observing the creation of positrons, so it has been done since at least 1933.  Just don't expect to produce them at will (other than by having lots of chances for  such things to occur) or with any kind of efficiency.

[Hannu2]

1 hour ago, wumpus said:

Any antimatter physicists have experimented on was created from energy, typically almost immediately before observation (although I think positrons have been confined for measurable periods of time since the 1980s).  Dirac's (and Schrödinger's) Nobel prize came shortly after observing the creation of positrons, so it has been done since at least 1933.  Just don't expect to produce them at will (other than by having lots of chances for  such things to occur) or with any kind of efficiency.

All large particle accelerators which create new particles, for example LHC, convert kinetic energy of projectile particles to mass. For example 2 protons with mass of about 1 GeV and kinetic energy of several TeV hit and produce a Higgs boson with mass of 125 GeV (and bunch of other particles too). But I understood that Spacescifi meant conversion from electromagnetic field (photons) to massive particles. As far as I know it has not yet seen in laboratory.

[kerbiloid]

(Silently compares density of any chemical material, and density of the particle flow in the accelepipe...)

[sevenperforce]

2 hours ago, Hannu2 said:

All large particle accelerators which create new particles, for example LHC, convert kinetic energy of projectile particles to mass. For example 2 protons with mass of about 1 GeV and kinetic energy of several TeV hit and produce a Higgs boson with mass of 125 GeV (and bunch of other particles too). But I understood that Spacescifi meant conversion from electromagnetic field (photons) to massive particles. As far as I know it has not yet seen in laboratory.

I mean technically if you used solar power to run the LHC then you could turn photons into massive particles. It's just the long way of going about it.

[wumpus]

12 hours ago, Hannu2 said:

All large particle accelerators which create new particles, for example LHC, convert kinetic energy of projectile particles to mass. For example 2 protons with mass of about 1 GeV and kinetic energy of several TeV hit and produce a Higgs boson with mass of 125 GeV (and bunch of other particles too). But I understood that Spacescifi meant conversion from electromagnetic field (photons) to massive particles. As far as I know it has not yet seen in laboratory.

What gets me is that as far as I know all energy/mass balances.  Nobody has made dark matter...

[Spacescifi]

1 hour ago, wumpus said:

What gets me is that as far as I know all energy/mass balances.  Nobody has made dark matter...

 

I think you are saying that ton for ton, you will never get MORE than what a ton is made of via it's components.

You can add energy to it in the form of acceleration or heat, but that requires taking energy from somewhere too.

It's like the chicken or egg paradox.... only much harder.

Since:

1. We get photons from mass either reflecting or emitting it.

2. So the only way I can see mass coming from photons is to have a massive amount of them colliding in an organized fashion. Basically like a very organized big bang, since photons flying willy nilly won't help to collide them to create mass. And going from there who knows.... I was not around when the universe was born.

Edit: Maybe light is it! Maybe we really are made of photons!

That is actually funny!

So...  if you deconstruct all mass to it's most basic form... we are lifeless radiant energies.

How about that LOL.

 

Edited August 1, 2020 by Spacescifi