• Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Well, supposedly almost all hydrogen was made not long after the Big Bang went bang, with a tiny bit getting once in a while produced by the spontaneous formation of particle and anti-particle pairs, if I’m not mistaken.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      8 months ago

      Yeah, but then it combines with stuff and is no longer hydrogen. For example, a lot of it on earth is bound with oxygen in a from known as dihydrogen monoxide. You can input energy to separate the two hydrogen from the oxygen, but it’s not freely available. This is a useful way to spend excess energy to store the energy for later or to move, but not if you don’t have excess clean energy.

      You can also get some from things like Methane (CH4, aka natural gas). This is how most of the gas companies are producing it, and it obviously isn’t clean. They like to pretend it’s clean by saying using the hydrogen just produces water, but obviously the hydrogen didn’t just appear.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production

    • Gabu@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      You just described the same event twice. The particles formed shortly after the Big Bang came into being precisely through the formation of particle-antiparticle pairs in the energy-dense early universe.

    • exocrinous@startrek.website
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      8 months ago

      Hydrogen is the name of both an atom and a molecule, and humans are perfectly capable of creating hydrogen molecules.