A single gram of antimatter would be the most expensive substance ever made

Antimatter is the "mirror image" of ordinary matter — antiparticles have the same mass as their normal counterparts but the opposite electric charge. When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate each other, converting their entire mass directly into energy.

The problem is that producing antimatter in particle accelerators, like those at major physics laboratories, is extremely energy-inefficient — scientists can currently create only single atoms of antihydrogen at a time, at the cost of enormous amounts of energy.

Estimates based on real production costs suggest that manufacturing a single gram of antimatter would cost trillions of dollars — making it, at least in theory, the most expensive substance humanity could ever produce.

As of today, the total amount of antimatter humanity has produced across every experiment in history is still just a tiny fraction of a gram — less than what you could actually see with the naked eye.