A Matter of Energy – Why We Haven't Even Started Yet

When I think about science, technology and energy in particular, I always end up concluding that we haven't even started yet. Of course, that's not exactly true as we obviously have started at least something. But what is it and where does it lead?

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How much energy is there?

What I really want to talk about here is the interchangeability of matter and energy. Thanks to Einstein we know the two are undoubtably related, in fact they even seem to be of the same kind as matter is just a form of highly concentrated energy. I'm not going into the details here since that's a topic for another time. What's important is that – in theory – matter can be created from energy and energy can be created from matter. So, how much energy are we talking about?

This famous formula translates to: a lot.

Ten metric tons of matter could cover the world's current energy needs for an entire year. Those numbers are the reason why I say: we haven't even started yet.

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How do we get our energy?

Things aren't as simple, of course. We've got no idea how to release that energy without putting in way more.

Today we get our energy from harvesting solar energy, harvesting gravitational energy (think of dams), splitting atoms (nuclear energy) and by combustion.

Of those, chemical energy is the easiest to get. Although there are other forms of chemical energy, I'm talking about combustion here – burning stuff.

Let's consider 1 liter of fuel. Burning it releases around 9 kWh of energy of which 75% get lost mostly by waste heat. So, you end up with 2.5 kWh at best, whereas – theoretically – that one liter of matter contains 18 billion kWh worth of energy. That's obviously a lot more.

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How far can we go?

Of that one liter of fuel we actually use about a billionth of its total energy.

Nuclear energy – fission, that is – gives us about one thousandth of the matter's energy. That's already many orders of magnitudes higher than combustion. Nuclear fusion would provide a few times more and that's our next step. Yet there's still at least a hundred times more energy to be harvested from matter.

The ultimate goal would be to convert any form of matter into energy with near perfect efficiency.

How could this be achieved?

One of the possibilities would be antimatter as it is known to annihilate completely into energy when in contact with normal matter. The problem here: we don't have any antimatter. We've been able to produce small amounts (I'm talking a few atoms) in particle accelerators but we're far from any practical uses. It would be a great candidate for complete matter to energy conversion but we still got a long way to go.

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Thanks for the read.