Here Is The Most Expensive Substance On Earth, It Costs $62 Trillion Dollars Per Gram

With a mind-boggling price tag of $62,000,000,000,000 (£49 trillion) for a single gram, this substance is by far the most expensive thing on Earth.

However, even if you had the money, there might not be as much as a gram of this material anywhere in the universe.

Unlike precious gems or metals, you can’t just dig this ultra-rare material out of the ground.

Instead, the strange substance must be assembled atom by atom in a process that could take a billion years to gather one-tenth of a gram.

Although it sounds like something straight out of science fiction, atoms of antimatter are believed to be the most valuable material on Earth.

Like regular matter’s evil twin, antimatter is the mirror image of the atoms and particles that make up the universe around us.

Just like in the film Angels and Demons, when matter and antimatter meet they completely annihilate one another and release a vast amount of energy.

This means that antimatter disappears almost as soon as it can be made, making it incredibly expensive to store and study.

All the atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons, and subatomic particles which make up the observable universe are made of matter.

But for every type of matter particle, there exists an antimatter version that is exactly the same except that it has the opposite electrical charge.

For example, while matter protons have a positive charge, antiprotons have a negative charge.

These antiparticles can be assembled into anti-atoms, antimolecules, and in theory into entire antimatter planets and galaxies which would function just like our own.

In 1999, NASA scientist Harold Gerrish estimated that the price of antimatter was $62.5 trillion, or $1.75 quadrillion an ounce, based on the energy involved and the estimated production capacity.

While Gerrish estimated that the price would eventually come down, a more realistic understanding of the engineering challenges means that the true price could be even higher.

Speaking to ABC News, Professor Michael Doser, a particle physicist at CERN, said: ‘We make such minute quantities that even if you were to destroy all the antimatter that we’re making in the course of a year, it wouldn’t be even enough to boil a cup of tea.

‘One 100th of a nanogram [of antimatter] costs as much as one kilogram of gold.’

That would make the price for a gram approximately $5.24 quadrillion (£4.16 quadrillion).

New antimatter is being created all the time, all around us and even inside our own bodies.

When radioactive materials like potassium decay, they produce an electron and an antimatter electron called a positron.

This means that a banana, which is particularly rich in radioactive potassium, generates about one antimatter particle every hour.

However, because these particles are quickly annihilated by the surrounding matter, that isn’t much help for scientists who want to study it.

To get antimatter on demand, you need to force it into existence by concentrating so much energy at a single point that it actually becomes matter.

At CERN, scientists use huge particle accelerators to speed up a stream of protons, and positively charged particles, and slam them into an iridium block.

About once in every million collisions, huge amounts of energy are concentrated into a particle of matter and an antimatter twin is born along with it.

These particles are then carefully syphoned off into a machine called the Antiproton Decelerator which uses powerful magnets to concentrate the antimatter into a stream travelling one-tenth the speed of light.

However, this entire process consumes unbelievable quantities of energy.

CERN’s particle accelerators make up about 90 per cent of the research centre’s 1,250-gigawatt yearly energy bill.

For comparison, London is estimated to consume just 37,800 Gigawatts of energy each year.

Additionally, this process only produces extremely small amounts of antimatter with CERN making just nanograms of material each year – which makes antimatter unbelievably expensive by weight.

But making the antimatter isn’t the end of the problem since antimatter will be destroyed if it ever comes into contact with regular matter.

To stop the newly formed antimatter from annihilating, it must be carefully contained by supercooled magnets inside a complete vacuum.

The current record for storing antimatter is 405 days for single particles and just 17 minutes for complete anti-atoms.

The researchers at CERN are currently trialling a method to use these magnetic ‘bottles’ to transport antimatter outside of the lab, driving it in a van to different research centres.

However, a recent test succeeded in moving just 70 regular matter protons, nowhere near even a nanogram of material.

Given all this difficulty, you might wonder why scientists persist with creating such an expensive and fickle substance.

The reason is that unpacking the mysteries of antimatter could help us understand why the universe is the way we see it now.

At the very beginning of the universe, scientists believed that both matter and antimatter were created in huge quantities, cancelling each other out until only the leftover matter remained to make up the universe.

But if matter and antimatter were created in equal quantities then it doesn’t make sense that there would be any matter left over at all.

This means there could be some subtle difference between matter and antimatter which means that the two are not entirely symmetrical.

Or, if scientists don’t find a difference, it could be that we just happen to live in a part of the universe full of matter while entire antimatter regions are hidden somewhere just out of sight.