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The most outrageously expensive substance ever made by humans clocks in at approximately $62.5 trillion per single gram—and across the entire history of science, we’ve only succeeded in producing a grand total of a few nanograms.
The most outrageously expensive substance ever made by humans clocks in at approximately $62.5 trillion per single gram—and across the entire history of science, we’ve only succeeded in producing a grand total of a few nanograms.Antimatter isn’t something you can dig up, drill for, or collect from nature. It has to be created atom by atom in the most advanced particle accelerators on Earth, such as those at CERN. Scientists accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light, smash them together in carefully controlled collisions, and then try to capture the incredibly short-lived antimatter particles that pop into existence for fractions of a second before annihilating with normal matter.Even after more than half a century of cutting-edge research, enormous facilities, and billions upon billions of dollars spent on infrastructure, energy, and experiments, the sum total of all the antimatter humanity has ever manufactured remains so minuscule that it’s invisible to the naked eye—measured in nanograms at best, with no facility ever producing even a microgram in total.The jaw-dropping price isn’t because there’s a booming black-market demand or because it’s sitting in some vault waiting to be sold. It’s purely a reflection of the mind-boggling difficulty, energy cost, and technological barriers involved in making even the tiniest amount. The laws of physics seem almost designed to make antimatter extremely rare and unstable in our matter-dominated universe—any contact between matter and antimatter triggers complete mutual annihilation, releasing pure energy in the form of gamma rays.This figure (frequently quoted from early NASA estimates for antihydrogen production and still widely cited in popular science) underscores why antimatter stays confined to the realm of laboratory experiments and theoretical physics rather than practical applications. While production rates have improved somewhat in recent decades thanks to better traps and cooler techniques, we remain unimaginably far from creating even a visible speck—let alone anything that could be weighed on a scale or used outside of tiny research quantities.
