Most expensive substance on Earth 'costs $62,000,000,000,000 for just one gram'

Gold? Diamond? Some sort of drugs? If you were trying to guess what the most expensive material on earth is, let's not lie, those would probably be some of your top options.

However, it's time to stop thinking like Marilyn Monroe or Pablo Escobar because you're not even close. The most expensive material on the planet, which costs an eye-watering '$62 trillion for just one gram', has a name you're unlikely to have stumbled across ever before.

The material doesn't only come with a whopping price tag but also takes a pretty hefty 1 billion years to even create.

And no, we're not talking about saffron either - a cooking ingredient that is worth more than just a few dollars.

Now, here's when being a Tom Hanks fan gives you an upper hand, because if you've seen the 2009 Tom Hanks classic Angels and Demons, you may be able to try and reach back into your memory of the film and find the answer.

Anything?

You may remember antimatter from Angels and Demons (Sony)

No? Well, for those who don’t know, the world's most expensive substance is actually something called antimatter - almost the same as normal matter except it has the opposite electric charge.

In the Hanks film, we learnt antimatter would explode if it came into contact with anything made of matter (which is pretty much everything). This is because two opposing forces aren’t compatible - hence the reaction.

But while matter is everywhere, antimatter is incredibly rare. So rare that it can only be manufactured using CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which plays a part in why it is so expensive to get hold of.

It was 24 years ago (1999) that NASA scientists predicted the cost to make just one gram of anti-hydrogen or antimatter.

$62 trillion is certainly a lot of money for something so small.

If you thought this was an exaggerated estimate, even Steven Farmer, author of the 2017 book Strange Chemistry, agreed the price tag is around $62.5 trillion per gram.

But if the price tag is off-putting, know that it’s a remarkably useful substance, even though it’s an unstable matter.

I mean, if you handle it with care and not in a ridiculously dangerous way, it could be an incredible energy source, with some even thinking it has the ability to fuel intergalactic space travel.

The 'anti matter factory' at CERN (BBC)

However, at the moment it's being used for things like medical imaging equipment, such as the positron emission tomography (PET) scanner - used by doctors to look at certain functions like blood flow.

But using it on a large scale would prove it to be insanely expensive, as the CERN LHC is also ridiculously expensive to operate.

Science To Go estimated that it costs around $1 billion each year to run, with electricity costs additionally mounting to $23.5 million per year.

Because of the way the CERN needs to get up to a speed of 99.99 percent of the speed of light to create the substance, the cost to run it is incredible.

It could use enough electricity to power a large city!

Did we mention that to even create a gram of antimatter, it'd take about 1 billion years?

So, maybe $62 trillion is a fair deal after all.

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