Total conversion

:This article is about a concept in Science Fiction. For the use in mods for computer games, see the Total conversion section in .

In science fiction, the phrase total conversion generally refers to the idea of converting nearly 100% of mass into usable energy. The first reference to such a process may have occurred in the classic Robert A. Heinlein short story Universe, which certainly was the first to describe a large, slow multi-generational starship. Its power source was called "the Converter".

The concept of combining ordinary matter with antimatter, which indeed can convert 100% of mass into energy, which was popularized by the 1960s television series Star Trek, is usually called "annihilation" (though for proton and neutron annihilation, a significant percentage of the energy ends up in neutrinos, so the use-able total is less than 100%). The Universe is not known to possess large natural supplies of antimatter, and current theoretical thinking is that it actually doesn't. Antimatter can be manufactured, but doing so requires using at least as much energy as would later be released during annihilation. Nevertheless, manufactured antimatter is speculated to someday be useful as a form of extremely concentrated stored energy, for special purposes such as powering spaceships.

Modern developments in Physics have yielded the possibility that there may be a way to actually convert 100% of ordinary matter into energy. The physicist Stephen Hawking showed that a black hole can interact with virtual particles in the vacuum in such a way that the black hole can "evaporate". This is known as Hawking radiation. For most black holes (possessing stellar mass) the evaporation process takes place extremely slowly, but the smaller it gets, the faster it evaporates (provided nothing falls into the black hole while all this is going on). The actual "evaporant" is a flow of subatomic particles from the hole, travelling at nearly the speed of light. Due to the nature of virtual particles, the escaping particles should be roughly a 50/50 mix of ordinary particles and antimatter particles. The implication is that if we started with an appropriately small black hole, which was suffering from a fierce rate of escaping particles, we could deliberately inject (at the same rate) ordinary matter into the hole to compensate for the mass it loses that way. Then we gather up the escaping particles and allow them to annihilate each other. The net effect is the total conversion of the ordinary matter which is fed to the black hole, into the pure energy of the annihilated escaped particles. However, depending on what total percentage of the escaping particles are neutrinos, this particular total conversion process may be problematic. We know of no way to "gather up" neutrinos and make them annihilate with anti-neutrinos. So, this may turn out to be less useful than the "accretion disc" phenomenon, even though accretion can convert no more than 40% of mass into energy. (By comparison, the nuclear fusion of hydrogen that powers the stars only converts about 1%.)

In the webcomic Schlock Mercenary, total conversion via "annie plants" is the standard means of generating power for everything from the largest warships to personal sidearms. Annie plants operate using some form of technological gravity manipulation to crush ordinary matter into neutronium, which decays when released from the artificial gravity field.

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