Kind of makes you feel small

There’s oodles of perspectivity in an essay in The Monthly by Luke Davies about the ‘final frontier’ of space travel.

For instance, the following quote from Richard Obousy of Project Icarus:

“We only have the capability to produce a few tenths of a billion of a gram of antimatter – in fact, that’s about the level that CERN is creating at the moment. And if you extrapolate the cost you get into trillions of dollars per gram of antimatter. But CERN isn’t optimised for antimatter creation. It’s a nice by-product of the experiments they do, but it’s like building an entire McDonald’s chain just to get a single French fry.”

“Anti-matter rocket”

To put that further into perspective, our present trouble is that an even modestly ambitious interstellar space travel program would require a mass production line of McHappy Meals.

UPDATE

By the way, the double entendre of “kind of makes you feel small” in juxtaposition with the ‘phallic’ imagery has only just now occurred to me. It was either completely unintentional, or unconscious expression of a deep-seated anxiety. But, as Freud once said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.