Science & Technology

World's most expensive material costs $62 trillion for a single gram

By T.K. Randall
February 18, 2025 ·  1 comment

Antimatter is incredibly difficult to create and store. Image Credit: Pixabay / geralt When it comes to expensive materials, most people will think of such things as gold and silver, but there are actually other things that are far more valuable than these common precious metals.

Palladium, for instance, which is used in all manner of common applications ranging from catalytic converters in cars to dentistry, currently fetches a price of around $32 per gram.

Rhodium, meanwhile, which is also used in catalytic converters, costs over $160 per gram.

But these prices are nothing compared to the cost of one particular substance that is so difficult to produce that it literally has to be created one atom at a time in a laboratory setting.This process is incredibly slow, taking 10 billion years to produce a single gram.

And the cost for that one gram ? Somewhere around $62,000,000,000,000 ($62 trillion).

This figure is based on an estimate provided by NASA scientist Harold Gerrish who, in 1999, calculated the cost of producing it based on production capacity and energy requirements.

Possessing the same mass as ordinary particles but with an opposing charge, antimatter is as elusive as it is mysterious and could help physicists understand more about the way the universe works.

When antimatter and regular matter meet, they annihilate one another (releasing a burst of energy in the process) - meaning that actually creating and storing it is extremely difficult.

Suffice to say, this is one substance that we are unlikely to see being mass produced anytime soon.

Source: Mail Online | Comments (1)

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