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How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; at which point everyone is left flat footed by having not

How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; at which point everyone is left flat footed by having not researched it.

throwaway290 2y ago
If no one would publish it no one would do it. After understanding what "mirror bacteria" is I have one word and that's "Yikes"
throwuxiytayq 2y ago
We don’t research what happens when a child falls out of a plane and nobody feels like we’re falling behind for it.
- exe34 2y ago
  but would a ban really stop somebody from trying?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - PhasmaFelis 2y ago
    If you can't get funding for your research, or publish under your real name if you do, it's certainly going curtail research at least. It could still happen if some nations refuse to endorse the ban, but there will at least be less of it, which means less risk.
    - exe34 2y ago
      That is to say, our enemies will master it first and we will be caught with our pants down.
      - achierius 2y ago
        This sort of rhetoric is disgusting, and likely the exact sort that will lead to mass death incidents in our lifetime. I hope you think about that when such comes to pass.
        exe34 2y ago
        I'll die happy, knowing "I told you so."
      - PhasmaFelis 2y ago
        We're not talking about a targeted weapon, we're talking about accidentally unleashing an unstoppable global pandemic. If only China is risking that, the odds are better for everyone.
        exe34 2y ago
        Why wouldn't they make it into a targeted weapon? Us humans turn everything else into a weapon.
        PhasmaFelis 2y ago
        We are talking about an all-infecting pandemic. You can certainly weaponize it, if you think global collapse sounds fun. What you can't do is target it.
        toss1 2y ago
        If you and only you (and maybe some allies) also make an antidote or vaccine, it is targeted at everyone who doesn't. And that is a huge blackmail opportunity. OFC, if any leader worth their salt will respond with "Hell NO, if you threaten us again with that, or we find any sign it is released, we'll nule everything in your land and anywhere it is found. Even if a vaccine/antidote works for humans, destroying the animal & plant populations would just result in the surving humans to die slower of starvation. Thinking about this for a few seconds, it is really pointless, and maybe one of the most serious examples of "Just because you can do it, think hard about whether you should do it". The answer is Fck NO. (And I'm almost always in favor of tech advances.)
- Jerrrry 2y ago
  We actually did, it's a solved problem. Research bans do not inherently work. Treaties need enforced, and the Streisand effect and arms-race dynamic play into the game theory as well.
- harimau777 2y ago
  I think that the difference may be that there's relatively little benefit or desire to researching children falling out of planes and we have fairly easy ways to study the question indirectly (accelerometers, cadaver studies, animal studies, etc.). Also, there are numerous examples throughout history of people performing evil human studies; so while people may not have studied children falling from planes, people have studied equivalent things.
- dogma1138 2y ago
  There is no potential profit in researching that, this isn’t the case with mirror chirality organisms.
- dekhn 2y ago
  Without directly addressing your proposed experiment, the history of aviation was filled with all sorts of grotesque experiments on humans. Absolutely disgusting stuff, like suffocating people to simulate high altitude flight. There was an ethical quandary about whether to use this data (IE, as citations).
krisoft 2y ago
> How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; This is a function of how easy it is to do the banned thing, how easy it is to detect when it is being researched and what are the benefits of researching it. Imagine as an example that we live in a world where there are no firearms, and we decide to ban their research and development. All three factors would be against the ban. It is relatively easy to make primitive firearms (all you need is metal working tools). It is hard to detect when someone is doing it (they can keep their firearms secret, and the tools and activity disguised as something else) and the firearm once developed will be of great benefit to whoever developed it. So a blanket ban against firearms would be unstable. It wouldn't work. Let's look at an other example. Nuclear weapons. They are much harder to create (you need a whole industrial project to develop the tech, lot of engineers, and lot of energy consuming processes), there are pre-cursor technologies you can monitor to have an early warning (uranium enrichment, centrifuges, etc), it doesn't have immediate benefits unless you also develop a reliable delivery mechanism for it. And these are the factors while nuclear weapons don't proliferate everywhere. You can't buy them in the mall, smaller countries don't have them etc. I don't know what the answer to these questions are for "mirror life" but the framework is the same. How hard is to develop it? If a single dude in a shed can do it, there is probably no point banning it. It will happen sooner than later. If it requires coordinated effort from multiple research groups and industrial partners, then a ban might work. How hard is detect when someone is developing it? Can they hide it? Is the process using common materials and equipment? Do they need to get stuff only people who develop mirror life would need? But the final question is the most important: What do they win? If there is some military benefit to developing "mirror life" then we are lost, and it will be developed. If there is some big economic benefit a ban might work, but it will be an uphill battle. If there is no benefit to it, and it is just cool and interesting to do, it will be a lot simpler for a ban to hold.
- harimau777 2y ago
  That's a great framework for assessing it, thank you! It seems to me that to a degree nuclear weapons show some of the problems with a research ban. I think that it's possible that nuclear weapons are proliferating just very slowly. The problem seems to be that once someone engages in forbidden research, then their rivals feel the need to as well. E.g. we allowed China to get a nuclear weapon so India decided they needed one which led to Pakistan needing one. More currently, we allowed Israel to get nuclear weapons so now Iran is likely trying to get them. It's also notable that the two instances where people gave up nuclear weapons, Gaddafi and Ukraine; have both ended poorly for the people who gave them up. All this to say, I wonder if it might be possible to slow research on a subject but not to stop it completely.
tivert 2y ago
> How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; at which point everyone is left flat footed by having not researched it. Someone's going to need to work it out, because if the problem of "how to ban existentially dangerous things" is not solved, eventually we'll be fucked. And realistically, we're probably fucked, because humanity probably simply lacks the maturity to not fuck itself over at some point (e.g. because of the logic "if we don't do it someone else will" is scarily effective, and some people are just unhinged for really stupid reasons). We probably only made it this far because of external constraints limited what we could do. Part of me thinks it may turn out that a that a full-scale nuclear war that knocks out industrial civilization (especially if it's followed by A Canticle for Leibowitz-style anti-intellectual social changes) may not be such a bad thing in the long run, if it buys humanity a few more millennia.

How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; at which point everyone is left flat footed by having not researched it.

throwaway290 2y ago

If no one would publish it no one would do it. After understanding what "mirror bacteria" is I have one word and that's "Yikes"

throwuxiytayq 2y ago

We don’t research what happens when a child falls out of a plane and nobody feels like we’re falling behind for it.

exe34 2y ago
but would a ban really stop somebody from trying?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- PhasmaFelis 2y ago
  If you can't get funding for your research, or publish under your real name if you do, it's certainly going curtail research at least. It could still happen if some nations refuse to endorse the ban, but there will at least be less of it, which means less risk.
  - exe34 2y ago
    That is to say, our enemies will master it first and we will be caught with our pants down.
    - achierius 2y ago
      This sort of rhetoric is disgusting, and likely the exact sort that will lead to mass death incidents in our lifetime. I hope you think about that when such comes to pass.
      - exe34 2y ago
        I'll die happy, knowing "I told you so."
    - PhasmaFelis 2y ago
      We're not talking about a targeted weapon, we're talking about accidentally unleashing an unstoppable global pandemic. If only China is risking that, the odds are better for everyone.
      - exe34 2y ago
        Why wouldn't they make it into a targeted weapon? Us humans turn everything else into a weapon.
        PhasmaFelis 2y ago
        We are talking about an all-infecting pandemic. You can certainly weaponize it, if you think global collapse sounds fun. What you can't do is target it.
        toss1 2y ago
        If you and only you (and maybe some allies) also make an antidote or vaccine, it is targeted at everyone who doesn't. And that is a huge blackmail opportunity. OFC, if any leader worth their salt will respond with "Hell NO, if you threaten us again with that, or we find any sign it is released, we'll nule everything in your land and anywhere it is found. Even if a vaccine/antidote works for humans, destroying the animal & plant populations would just result in the surving humans to die slower of starvation. Thinking about this for a few seconds, it is really pointless, and maybe one of the most serious examples of "Just because you can do it, think hard about whether you should do it". The answer is Fck NO. (And I'm almost always in favor of tech advances.)
Jerrrry 2y ago
We actually did, it's a solved problem. Research bans do not inherently work. Treaties need enforced, and the Streisand effect and arms-race dynamic play into the game theory as well.
harimau777 2y ago
I think that the difference may be that there's relatively little benefit or desire to researching children falling out of planes and we have fairly easy ways to study the question indirectly (accelerometers, cadaver studies, animal studies, etc.). Also, there are numerous examples throughout history of people performing evil human studies; so while people may not have studied children falling from planes, people have studied equivalent things.
dogma1138 2y ago
There is no potential profit in researching that, this isn’t the case with mirror chirality organisms.
dekhn 2y ago
Without directly addressing your proposed experiment, the history of aviation was filled with all sorts of grotesque experiments on humans. Absolutely disgusting stuff, like suffocating people to simulate high altitude flight. There was an ethical quandary about whether to use this data (IE, as citations).

krisoft 2y ago

> How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; This is a function of how easy it is to do the banned thing, how easy it is to detect when it is being researched and what are the benefits of researching it. Imagine as an example that we live in a world where there are no firearms, and we decide to ban their research and development. All three factors would be against the ban. It is relatively easy to make primitive firearms (all you need is metal working tools). It is hard to detect when someone is doing it (they can keep their firearms secret, and the tools and activity disguised as something else) and the firearm once developed will be of great benefit to whoever developed it. So a blanket ban against firearms would be unstable. It wouldn't work. Let's look at an other example. Nuclear weapons. They are much harder to create (you need a whole industrial project to develop the tech, lot of engineers, and lot of energy consuming processes), there are pre-cursor technologies you can monitor to have an early warning (uranium enrichment, centrifuges, etc), it doesn't have immediate benefits unless you also develop a reliable delivery mechanism for it. And these are the factors while nuclear weapons don't proliferate everywhere. You can't buy them in the mall, smaller countries don't have them etc. I don't know what the answer to these questions are for "mirror life" but the framework is the same. How hard is to develop it? If a single dude in a shed can do it, there is probably no point banning it. It will happen sooner than later. If it requires coordinated effort from multiple research groups and industrial partners, then a ban might work. How hard is detect when someone is developing it? Can they hide it? Is the process using common materials and equipment? Do they need to get stuff only people who develop mirror life would need? But the final question is the most important: What do they win? If there is some military benefit to developing "mirror life" then we are lost, and it will be developed. If there is some big economic benefit a ban might work, but it will be an uphill battle. If there is no benefit to it, and it is just cool and interesting to do, it will be a lot simpler for a ban to hold.

harimau777 2y ago
That's a great framework for assessing it, thank you! It seems to me that to a degree nuclear weapons show some of the problems with a research ban. I think that it's possible that nuclear weapons are proliferating just very slowly. The problem seems to be that once someone engages in forbidden research, then their rivals feel the need to as well. E.g. we allowed China to get a nuclear weapon so India decided they needed one which led to Pakistan needing one. More currently, we allowed Israel to get nuclear weapons so now Iran is likely trying to get them. It's also notable that the two instances where people gave up nuclear weapons, Gaddafi and Ukraine; have both ended poorly for the people who gave them up. All this to say, I wonder if it might be possible to slow research on a subject but not to stop it completely.

tivert 2y ago

> How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; at which point everyone is left flat footed by having not researched it. Someone's going to need to work it out, because if the problem of "how to ban existentially dangerous things" is not solved, eventually we'll be fucked. And realistically, we're probably fucked, because humanity probably simply lacks the maturity to not fuck itself over at some point (e.g. because of the logic "if we don't do it someone else will" is scarily effective, and some people are just unhinged for really stupid reasons). We probably only made it this far because of external constraints limited what we could do. Part of me thinks it may turn out that a that a full-scale nuclear war that knocks out industrial civilization (especially if it's followed by A Canticle for Leibowitz-style anti-intellectual social changes) may not be such a bad thing in the long run, if it buys humanity a few more millennia.