If you could guess the name of the most expensive substance on Earth, would you be correct?
Probably not!
This crazy expensive material ‘costs $62 trillion for just one gram’ which is an amount that would take 100 billion years to create.
Of course, you’re probably thinking it’s gold or a rare type of diamond, but that’s not even close.
It’s not any type of metal or jewel – and it’s not saffron either, which is one of the most expensive cooking ingredients ever.
However, if you’ve seen the 2009 Tom Hanks classic Angels and Demons, you’ve probably accidentally stumbled upon the answer.
This flick, based on the Dan Brown novel, briefly mentioned the material.
Do you remember now?
For those who don’t know, the world’s most expensive substance is actually something called antimatter.
This is almost the same as normal matter except it has the opposite electric charge.
In the Hanks film, we learnt that antimatter would explode if it came into contact with anything made of matter (which is pretty much everything).
Sony
This is because two opposing forces aren’t compatible – hence the reaction.
But while matter is everywhere, antimatter is incredibly rare. So rare that it can only be manufactured using CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which plays a part in why it is so expensive to get hold of.
It was 24 years ago (1999) that NASA scientists predicted the cost to make just one gram of anti-hydrogen or antimatter.
$62 trillion is certainly a lot of money for something so small.
If you thought this was an exaggerated estimate, even Steven Farmer, author of the 2017 book Strange Chemistry, agreed the price tag is around $62.5 trillion per gram.
It’s even more impressive of a price tag considering the masanational Monetary Fund projected the value of the entire world’s economy as being around $104 trillion by the end of last year.
But if the price tag is off-putting, know that it’s a remarkably useful substance, even though it’s an unstable matter.
I mean, if you handle it with care and not in a ridiculously dangerous way, it could be an incredible energy source, with some even thinking it has the ability to fuel intergalactic space travel.
BBC
However, at the moment, it is being used things like medical imaging equipment such as the positron emission tomography (PET) scanner.
This scanner is used by doctors to look at certain functions like blood flow.
But using it on a large-scale would prove it be insanely expensive as the CERN LHC is also ridiculously expensive to operate.
Science To Go estimated that it costs around $1 billion each year to run, with electricity costs additionally mounting to $23.5 million per year.
Because of the way the CERN needs to get up to a speed of 99.99 percent of the speed of light to create the substance, the cost to run it is incredible.
It could use enough electricity to power a large city!
Did we mention that to even create a gram of antimatter, it’d take about 100 billion years?
So, maybe $62 trillion is a fair deal.
