http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_329a.html
This is the Straight Classic question from Cecil’s first book.
He says the most expensive thing in the world was Californium-252 at $1,000 a microgram.
Since this answer is several years old, is it still accurate? Is Californium-252 more expensive nowadays or is there something even pricier than this isotope?
This article:
Reaching for the stars: Scientists examine using antimatter and fusion to propel future spacecraft
claims that antimatter is the most expensive substance, costing approx. US$62.5 trillion per gram. But some people estimate the price could drop to US$5000 per microgram (US$5 billion per gram) which would make it a real bargain.
. . . can we truly call antimatter a substance, though?
And Bush wants to reduce taxation? :rolleyes: I mean, how are gonna afford to build the starship Enterprise if he does that? He is so short-sighted…
But seriously…
andros: Anti-matter would be a substance if you have an anti-proton orbited by a positron; this would be an atom of anti-hydrogen. It seems to me that you only need one stable atom in order to have a substance.
… but available at Walmart at only USD 4,900 per microgram.
According to
http://www.californium.com/element.htm
the price of Californium-252 is at “$10/mg”.
Looks pretty cheap.
onigame - $10 per milligram? That’s a little too cheap. I noticed that the page to which you provided a link is a page for a graphic design company called Californium, and I suspected that they might have been careless with their units. I went to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory page and found their advertisement for Californium. When I called the number at the bottom of the page, the nice lady at the other end told me that Californium-252 is $65 per microgram, plus shipping charges. I have no idea how much shipping charges are, and the employee of the ORNL told me they only calculate the shipping charges for an official quote, not an inquiry over the phone.
I agree that it’s too cheap. I think the company couldn’t figure out how to type a lower-case “mu” and decided that “m” was close enough. Or something like that.
Back to the column, though, I suspect that Cecil’s answer still stands. Yes, antimatter is more expensive to produce (as it was at the time the column was written, as well), but it’s not (currently) a saleable commodity. You’ll never see CERN calling up Brookhaven on the phone and saying “Hey, we’re running a bit low on positrons. Could you ship us a few, and we’ll drop a check in the mail?”. Various laboratries and such will, however, buy and sell small quantities of californium.
Chronos, you may very well have a good argument for saying that antimatter just doesn’t matter to the discussion here, but that doesn’t mean that Californium-252 is still the most expensive item – after all, it’s apparently depreciated quite a bit already!
Someone will have to call up one of those laboratories and ask if Cf-252 is still the most expensive one.
I looked at http://www.guinnessrecords.com and while I could not find the most expensive thing in the world, I did find that the rarest natural element on Earth is astatine. (I’ve never heard of it before.) It is estimated that if we were to strip-mine the entire Earth’s crust and filter out all the astatine, we’d get about 9 ounces of it. http://www.encyclopedia.com says there’s probably only one ounce of it.
Astatine 211 can be produced more cheaply, however, by using a cyclotron to bombard bismuth 209 with alpha particles. It’s radioactive, with a half-life of about 7.21 hours.
Astatine’s a halogen (group 7), fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine, astatine. The things they don’t teach in school nowadays 