Living On Food Pills

Is it possible to live off of vitamin, mineral, carbohydrate, and protein pills? --Cosmic Cat


I could just Google food pills and see what comes up, but who wants to do that? That would be boring.


Let's deal with vitamins and minerals first. There are already pills that provide these. A random example includes Vitamin A, some B Vitamins, Vitamin C, Vitamin D, Vitamin E, Omega 3s, iron, calcium, zinc, magnesium, and iodine. Some more Google searching shows that various other dietary minerals can be purchased as supplements. Apparently even arsenic supplements exist. You probably don't want to overdose on those. As one might imagine from the existence  of multivitamins, such a pill would be small enough to consume. Summing up the weights of all the suggested daily values for the various vitamins and minerals (using the tables here and here) comes out to about 11 grams, so it's safe to say that you could make a pill-sized pill that could satisfy your vitamin and mineral needs.


Macronutrients such as carbohydrates and protein are difficult though. The USDA suggests consuming 130 grams of carbohydrates per day, about 30 grams of fiber, again about 30 grams of fat, and an average of perhaps 45 to 50 grams of protein. When we add all these together, we can see that a macronutrient "pill" would not exactly be a pill. More like a blob of stuff weighing about half a pound.

But let's just go with the half-pound blob. There's a simple problem with this: the average American consumes 1996 pounds per year (according to an NPR blog), which comes out to just under 5.5 pounds per day--more than 10 times the weight of our glob of nutrients. That will cause some problems with satiety, or the state of feeling full. If one has early satiety (the state of feeling full after eating a small meal), then this could still work. Early satiety is caused by a lot of nasty diseases, so inducing it isn't something you should try at home. If you do decide to contract a deadly disease, then all I can say is wow, you must be really determined to live on food pills. At least it would work better than breatharianism though.

Antimatter Car

What would be the fuel economy of a car powered by antimatter? --Myself

Note: I originally put this post on pastebin. 

Antilithium is probably the best type of antimatter for fueling a car. It's not a gas like antihydrogen or antihelium, but it's easier to make than heavier anti-elements. So first, I took the density of lithium. Theodore Gray's book The Elements tells me that lithium has a density of 0.535 grams per cubic centimeter. Obviously, antilithium will have the same density. A gallon contains 4000 cubic centimeters (~4 liters * 1000 cubic centimeters in a liter). So a gallon of antilithium would have a mass of 2140 grams. Wikipedia's article on antimatter weapons states that one gram of antimatter could be converted to 180 terajoules of energy. Thus, 2140 grams of antimatter could be converted to 385.2 petajoules of energy. Next, I needed to find the energy in a gallon of regular gas. A PDF from the University of Washington tells me that this number is 130,000,000 joules. 385,200,000,000,000,000/130,000,000 is 2,963,076,923, so antilithium fuel is about approximately 2.963 billion times as efficient as gasoline fuel. But how efficient is gasoline? Obviously, the fuel economy of cars varies hugely, but some blog says that the average fuel economy for new cars in 2013 was 24.9 miles per gallon, so we'll go with that. Multiply 24.9 by 2.963 billion and we get 73,780,615,382.7 miles per gallon.


How far could you get with such a car? Well, the average gas tank is about 16 gallons (so says Yahoo Answers, the very epitome of reliability), so a tank of antilithium would get you 1.18 trillion miles. A lightyear is about 6 trillion miles (thanks, Wikipedia) so a one lightyear trip would require five refills and a drive to Alpha Centauri (the nearest star, 4.2 light years away) would require over 20 refills of antilithium.


There aren't many antilithium stations in interstellar space^{[citation needed]}, but let's suppose there were. Would this drive be worth it? The cost of antihydrogen is $62.5 trillion per gram, according to this. There aren't any estimates (Really! None at all! And this is the Web!) for the cost of antihelium, so I have to blatantly guess. Let's just say that antihelium is ten times as expensive, at $625 trillion per gram. A website implies that antilithium is a million times harder to make, so let's assume it's a million times as expensive. That comes out to $625 quintillion per gram. Going back to the last paragraph, it seems that we'd need 684,800 grams of antilithium to make the trip, so the cost of fuel would be $428 septillion. Let's just say that this is more money than Bill Gates currently has.^{[dubious--discuss]} Oh and, someone would still have to build a highway, since car's don't work well in empty space.^{[citation needed]}