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A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life
- enos_feedler 2mo agoI thought they were concerned with people living on their devices. Like a mirror digital world. Too bad.
- largbae 2mo agoAh, another edition of "Don't Create the Torment Nexus". Expect startups to race for a demo of mirror life soon!
- GPerson 2mo agoI just assume the worst people in the world will have all the power and push for the most deranged reality possible, and somehow routinely get surprised when it’s twice as bad as I imagined.
- Avicebron 2mo agoWelcome to the information age, where the perpetual hype brinkmanship knows no bounds.
- HeWhoLurksLate 2mo agoWelcome to the automation age, where the bleeding edge gets ever bloodier
- antonvs 2mo agoAd companies need mirror life to create mirror ads that can bypass ad blockers.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- analog31 2mo agoExcept in the world of "anything is possible," mirror life would have no food. All biomolecules are chiral. On the other hand, the recommendations are all commonsense, and don't only apply to mirror life. For instance... >>> In a first line of effort, the United States should engage scientific superpowers, especially China, to build the foundation for collective restraint. Policymakers and the scientific community should prioritize transparent scientific collaboration, shared risk assessments, and early norm-setting.
- halflife 2mo agoIncorrect. There are symmetric achiral molecules. Which can be consumed as food for both normal, and mirror life, thus creating competition for resources.
- trebligdivad 2mo agoThat was the belief - but it was found it was possible to grow E.coli on non-chiral molecules that are commonly available. The worry then is that the immune system will ignore the wrong-chirality infection. See p.14 of https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/cv716pj4036/Technical%20Report%20on%20Mirror%20Bacteria%20Feasibility%20and%20Risks.pdf?download=true https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/cv716pj4036/Technical%20Rep...
- aguasdemarco 2mo agoThis is something which has been thought about by those in the field, and the conclusion is that it’s probably possible to engineer an organism with an ample food supply, e.g in this report https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads9158 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads9158 “ Achiral nutrients are available in quantities sufficient for growth of common bacteria in a wide range of natural environments, including within potential hosts (1). Further genetic engineering could provide mirror bacteria with pathways needed to consume abundant chiral nutrients such as d-glucose. Growth of mirror bacteria outside of the laboratory is therefore plausible. However, their interactions with other lifeforms would differ profoundly because of their reversed chirality.”
- HelloMcFly 2mo ago
- layla5alive 2mo agoThis is the first time I've seen one of these proposals which highlights a future potential harm and then makes the healthy proposal for radical open COOPERATION and mutual self-restraint instead of a surveillance panopticon and tyrannical oppression as the solution. Bravo! Recommendations: * In a first line of effort, the United States should engage scientific superpowers, especially China, to build the foundation for collective restraint. Policymakers and the scientific community should prioritize transparent scientific collaboration, shared risk assessments, and early norm-setting. * For the second line of effort, the United States should promote collective restraint across domestic, allied, and global scientific communities. This involves combining incentive-reducing measures with monitoring, verification, and other early-stage deterrence tools. * The United States should take great caution with actions or statements that could foster mistrust or spur strategic competition in the field of mirror life or its enabling technologies. * The United States must commit clearly to not developing mirror life, even if other actors are suspected of pursuing it. * U.S. policymakers should advance actions that require long lead times, such as legislation, treaties, and international engagement, in parallel. * U.S. policymakers should also treat countermeasures and resilience as constrained contingencies.
- kraken_cult 2mo agooff topic but I've noticed this CAPITALIZATION more and more in online discourse. I don't like it, but if you're using it can you maybe explain where it comes from? It definitely seems like a zoomer thing.
- arjie 2mo agoEvery time I see it I think of those YouTube videos people used to make: Ben Shapiro OWNS feminist with FACTS and LOGIC. Definitely sets the bozo bit.
- fhdkweig 2mo agoIt is for this reason that I like people doing it. I refer to it as setting "the evil bit". Go ahead and let me know that you only spout garbage before I even click the link.
- ls612 2mo agoWould dextro bacteria even be able to infect levo based life? Or is this just some fearmongering about bio to give more power to the government?
- MattPalmer1086 2mo agoMaybe it could, maybe it could not. If it could and we had no defence against, it could be disastrous, even world ending (for us). The precautionary principle applies. I'm not sure what advantage you see to a government in restricting this.
- fnord77 2mo agoNon-threat. Life has evolved and re-evolved thousands if not millions of times. One of those iterations would have been mirror biology if it were viable.
- Terr_ 2mo ago> Life has evolved and re-evolved thousands if not millions of times. From scratch, on the most basic enzymatic level? Nonsense, there's no evidence for that. > Non-threat. Most of the things that ever existed are dead, yet plenty of them could absolutely wreck humanity if magically reintroduced into an unprepared system.
- fnord77 2mo agoYes, from scratch. There's volumes of evidence for this.
- dumberquestions 2mo agoHuman level intelligence is viable but it only happened in one species and took billions of years.
- figbert 2mo agoExtremely relevant: https://www.hoover.org/research/biosecurity-really-strategy-victory https://www.hoover.org/research/biosecurity-really-strategy-...
- kibwen 2mo agoLeaving this here for no particular reason: https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#prelude https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#prelude
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2mo agoSo, my first time learning that mirror life is a thing and about its terrifying implications. I guess that's enough internet for today.
- dash2 2mo agoIf mirror bacteria could spread and avoid the body's immune defences, why has it not already evolved?
- kiwibyproxy 2mo agobecause as it was never observed to date, it could be assumed it does not exists yet, as the the article makes it sounds like it's very artificial / constructed
- 3eb7988a1663 2mo agoI swear I read of pharma companies experimenting with this. The idea that because the molecules are so foreign, the body lacks enzymes to breakdown the product, so the drug gets a much longer half-life than would be typical.
- conartist6 2mo agoThe underlying property is called "chirality" and describes why a left glove and a right glove are meaningfully different from each other even though they have the same topology. Many things can have chirality: big things like gloves, and small things like drugs. The concept is not alone a danger. The concept of a thing which could take our raw materials, disassemble them, and recompose them in a way that would deny us the use of those resources, that is the stuff of sci fi horror thriller. It sounds like the first thing that should be done is to contact Hollywood to make a really terrifying movie. In the sequel Russia will have bred a new generation of opposite-chirality humans and will be racing to colonize space first. (The big in-joke will be that they all wear the same gloves)
- cindyllm 2mo ago[dead]
- Terr_ 2mo agoBecause it's too much of a lift at once. To naturally get a mirror E-Coli you'd need a separate planet and billions of years and lots of luck. It's a mostly-incompatible change to all the machinery all the way down.
- msarnoff 2mo agoSee also “Your DietBet Destroyed the World” https://laprade.blog/your-dietbet-destroyed-the-world https://laprade.blog/your-dietbet-destroyed-the-world One of my favourite short stories, it’s always stuck with me since it was posted to HN a few years ago.
- freehorse 2mo agoGood thing that in our universe L-glucose seems to act as a laxative, so there is less of an incentive to mass-produce that for dieting purposes.
- gradschool 2mo agoA great science fiction premise could be that a technologically advanced adversary genetically engineers mirror life people to work as spies and saboteurs at wiping out the rest of the population so they can have the world for themselves, but they get rumbled by dogs specially trained to sniff them out or various other means that might surprise and delight the reader. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the difference between the smell of an orange and a lemon is down to the chirality of a single molecule.
- chasd00 2mo agoCan’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not but what you’re describing is Terminator. Early models were detectable by dogs because of rubber skin but newer models were cyborgs and had actual human skin and so were not as easily detectable and could hide among the people.
- mikestew 2mo agoI hate getting pedantic on a side note, but the T-1000s (improved model over the Arnie ones) were detectable by dogs, and they weren’t made of anything human. There’s a scene in T2 where the T-1000 is on the phone with a young John Connor, and John asks why the family dog is going nuts in the background.
- chasd00 2mo agoMy apologies too but I’m referring to terminator 1 so the Arnold version not the t1000. Reese describes this to Sarah the night John was conceived iirc.
- mikestew 2mo agoWell, by golly, I guess a rewatch is in order.
- justacrow 2mo agoIsn't that mainly because the T-1000 had broken in and killed his foster parents at that point?
- chuckadams 2mo agoAre the mirror bacteria sporting tiny little goatees?
- andy99 2mo agoworse, both mirror and normal bacteria have taken to wearing tiny chin-covering scarves so there’s no way to even tell which is which at a glance.
- reafev 2mo agoI understand the risk of mirror life i.e. mitochondrion that eat mirror sugar molecules. But I think that mirror chloroplast, that make mirror (beta) sugar inside regular planet cells can be a good way to fix carbon, without any way to free the co2 back besides fire. What's the danger in that?
- alephnerd 2mo agoThe danger is that (to quote Jurassic Park) "life always finds a way", and the risks are massive. A good example of the risks of mirror chirality is thalidomide - thalidomide has two enantiomers (one that provides sedative and anti-nausea effects and another that causes the infamous thalidomide birth defects) which the human body naturally flip-flops when administered. The risk to reward ratio is negatively misaligned (edited) when factoring the catastrophic risks and how easy it would be to weaponize (either on purpose or inadvertently).
- eventualcomp 2mo agoNo such thing as a too-low risk to reward ratio. That's basically free rewards.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- orborde 2mo agoMirror chloroplasts do not seem very risky, but the ability to create them is probably close to equivalent to the ability to create whole mirror bacteria/algae, so figuring out how to make mirror chloroplasts is a very risky line of research best refrained from.
- slipperybeluga 2mo ago[dead]
- paxys 2mo agoSo the proposed "strategy" is – don't do it, and ask others nicely not to do it. Good luck with that.
- roomey 2mo agoWritten about as sci-fi in "Change Agent" by Daniel Suarez. Which is a good book in my opinion
- AIorNot 2mo agoGod, Mirror Life sounds like something out of a bad Star Trek Episode… Humans can barely handle our current rate of technological progress..
- gs17 2mo agoHonestly, it sounds like a decent TNG episode, the transporter malfunctions, but the "victim" seems fine, except he's left handed now. Soon, the whole ship starts falling ill.
- kbelder 2mo agoThat's the plot of "Spock Must Die" by James Blish, the first Star Trek novel ever written. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spock_Must_Die https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spock_Must_Die!
- Danox 2mo agoSimple guideline don’t do it, unless you have another Earth to escape to, it sounds like the potential end of life as we know it if any of new the organisms were to ever get out of a lab. Aren’t Prions scary enough?
- txrx0000 2mo agoWhy assume that mirror life will somehow have a magical advantage over normal life and take over the world? If being opposite is what makes it exceptionally dangerous, then normal life would also be very dangerous to mirror life. The entire biosphere would be hostile to mirror life. Whatever mirror organism you synthesize probably already has countless natural predators and biological processes that interfere with every stage of its lifecycle.
- throwawayk7h 2mo agothis is true until you look at different trophic levels. Single-celled mirror life bacteria would be deadly to larger creatures.
- txrx0000 2mo agoThe planet is teeming with non-mirror things at every trophic level. The mirror bacteria has to somehow perfectly dodge all of the countless non-mirror things that can kill it (even unintentionally, like a byproduct molecule that just happens to blow it up or get in the way of reproduction), but somehow still be able to execute its own mirror-biomechanism to kill non-mirror things. And every step of the kill mechanism would also have to perfectly dodge non-mirror things interrupting it. Not that it can't be done in theory, but it would be easier to just make a normal superbacteria, or maybe even nanobots.
- bmitc 2mo ago> Whatever mirror organism you synthesize probably already has countless natural predators and biological processes that interfere with every stage of its lifecycle. How? They would have never been introduced to such mirror organisms, except potentially (but not certainly) around the formation of life 4 billion years ago.
- Angostura 2mo agoCould someone outline the threat to me? If mirrror life can only use mirror molecules as a source of nutrient - which are unavailable for use by conventional organisms, it feels like an infection risk is limited.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- mikewarot 2mo ago>Although mirror life does not yet exist How sure of that are we, really? I'm just a grump on the internet, so what do I know, but it sure seems like that's a huge assumption to be making. Perhaps we should fund some research to make sure of this? For a long time, all Swans were White, until they weren't. If we do find extant mirror life, we can all rest easier knowing it's unlikely to cause the end of the world, since it hasn't gotten us yet.
- bmitc 2mo agoI believe such statements have the implied "to all known knowledge". Also, ow would you prove it definitively?
- mikewarot 2mo agoThere's no reference to any systemic search for mirror life. You can't prove something doesn't exist, but you can actually search and document the methods used, who knows, it's probably all around us. It wouldn't surprise me to learn it's part of how fungi communicate or something like that. It would be far better to find it, and document where and how it already works, wouldn't it? I know that goes against the funding paradigm we have, but that's shit anyway.
- quailfarmer 2mo agoIf I sequence the DNA of my child’s embryo, and then synthesize a mirror embryo, will my child be immune to all infection?