Question: Is it efficient to make antimatter or does it need more energy to make than it produces?

George Fulton answered on 13 Mar 2019:

This isn’t my area of expertise, so I’d welcome second opinions from the particle physicists 🙂

Creating antimatter is more natural then you might think. Bananas emit positrons for example – which are the anti-matter of electrons, and cosmic rays from space to create anti-protons too. So in some respects, it might not require any energy to harvest anti-protons and an anti-proton to proton annihilation would release a lot of energy!!! But I think the problem with anti-matter is that it is inherently unstable, when it comes into contact with real matter, it almost instantly releases its energy. For instance, this is why an antimatter bomb is likely impossible. The question would be how can we create a significant density of these antimatter reactions to generate enough heat in a given area to turn water into steam to create electricity? I don’t know the answer.