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- Hacker News
- If I sequence the DNA of my child’s embryo, and then synthesize a mirror embryo, will my child be immune to all infection?by quailfarmer
- Could 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.by Angostura
- Ah, another edition of "Don't Create the Torment Nexus". Expect startups to race for a demo of mirror life soon!by largbae
- I 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.by GPerson
- Are the mirror bacteria sporting tiny little goatees?by chuckadams
- worse, 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.by andy99
- Extremely relevant: https://www.hoover.org/research/biosecurity-really-strategy-...by figbert
- Except 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.
by analog31 - > All biomolecules are chiral.
The confidence with which people say utterly asinine things...
by greygoo222 - 1. Mirror life may be able to evolve catalysts that alter the chirality of non-mirror organic molecules.
2. Mirror chloroplasts may be able to use achiral small molecules to form mirror biological macromolecules, like normal chloroplasts.
by Sha1rholder - > Except in the world of "anything is possible," mirror life would have no food. All biomolecules are chiral.
Many essential biomolecules, nutrients, and amino acides are achiral (e.g. carbon dioxide, water, ammonium, phosphate, sulfate, glycine, and more). Mirror organisms could easily - at least in the realm of plausibility - function as autotrophs to convert sunlight, CO2, etc. into organic sugars, or extract energy from inorganic materials like hydrogen or iron paired with CO2.
by HelloMcFly - Incorrect. There are symmetric achiral molecules. Which can be consumed as food for both normal, and mirror life, thus creating competition for resources.by halflife
- That 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%20Rep...
by trebligdivad - This 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
“ 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.”
by aguasdemarco - Simple 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?
by Danox - >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.
by mikewarot - I believe such statements have the implied "to all known knowledge". Also, ow would you prove it definitively?by bmitc
- See also “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.
by msarnoff - Good 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.by freehorse
- I 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?
by reafev - The 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).
by alephnerd - Why 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.by txrx0000
- this is true until you look at different trophic levels. Single-celled mirror life bacteria would be deadly to larger creatures.by throwawayk7h
- > 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.
by bmitc - This 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.
by layla5alive - Why do you think such an approach would work, but something equivalent to try to prevent mass shootings / school shooter type gun violence wouldn't? Or would you say that radical open cooperation and mutual self restraint led by governments could stop the American problem of mass shootings like the Las Vegas shooter?
I don't see how you stop terrorism (of the school shooter type, not the Islamic/political type) with inter-government cooperation. Mirror life is just another vector for school shooters but with PHDs.
by chradams - I think the catch is there's no money to be made in mirror molecules / life... YET! If that changes, say mirror molecules some how extend life or have a therapeutic use then we're like to see the tune change.by anarticle
- The proposal tries to go against the current trend of US isolationism which burned a lot of good will with the rest of the world, and gain a bit of soft power back. Noble goal, but I’m not sure who wants to align behind the US today and risk getting dumped tomorrow.
On the topic of mirror life, doesn’t it need mirror food? I was under the impression that they couldn’t consume natural sugars for example, and so on. They’re talking about mirror life that uses non-mirrored molecules to propagate? How is mirror life building itself without mirror-everything-else?
by close04 - off 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.
by kraken_cult - I'm curious what solutions to Future threats you think qualify as a panopticon, and why the following set of words in this context don't make you worried about the same:
>monitoring, verification, and other early-stage deterrence tools.
by MostlyStable