If we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs. Another classic "this will be easy as long as we have unobtanium" concept.<p>I've been baffled, though, by the insistence on this kind of antimatter production. Antimatter production is inherently expensive because we are fighting conservation of baryon number, conservation of lepton number, et al.<p>Physics does have one theoretical method around this, which never seems to be addressed for these proposals, and that's the baffling issue of black holes having no hair. You throw whatever past the event horizon, all that is conserved is mass, angular momentum, and charge. Baryon number, lepton number, strangeness ... all lost. Re-emission as Hawking radiation, it is thought, would simply be this sort of thing, redistributed without regard to what went in, so long as mass, angular momentum, and charge are accounted for. You would conceivably get out as much antimatter as matter.<p>Now, that's worth looking at. And not from a "we JUST need to capture an itty black hole" (the word "just" does an enormous amount of lifting here) perspective. Rather, passage through the event horizon somehow strips off (we think, some think it might be preserved in some fashion) all of the variables which account for matter versus antimatter. And yet the event horizon isn't a hunk of matter, it's a ... membrane, a boundary, generated by matter at some distance (as a function of our usual three variables). Somehow, this warpage of spacetime operates on matter, shaving it so it has no hair.<p>That's what fascinates me, in the sense of the theoretical having some extremely juicy practical results.