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  • Hacker News
  • Gift link: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/09/30/...
    by acaloiar
  • Hey, finally a world-ending catastrophe that's actually plausible to worry about!
    by ForHackernews
  • There's a series of books from Petter Watts that give plenty of good reasons why this might not be the best idea:

    - "Starfish"

    - "Maelstrom"

    - "βehemoth"

    by sir_eliah
  • This sort of thing highlights the most dangerous thing about a high-tech society: people will do ANYTHING to cure a disease they or their loved ones have, even if it means an existential risk that we often have the ability of instantiating.

    Obviously not worth it, but to the person who themselves face an existential risk, the level of absurd justification from the instinct to survive will always trump sanity.

    by vouaobrasil
  • It's nowhere close to being possible. To do anything related to life you need to have a lot of complex molecules. When you do things with normal life you can have genetically modified organisms that will produce whatever substance you need in whatever amount you need.

    To get mirror substances you need to create them chemically which is PITA even if possible.

    I highly recommend watching an interview with a person that achieved best results so far with creating artificial normal (for some definitions of normal) almost life from the grounds up.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4WywVQfIV4

    There is a section of whether this kind of work enables creation mirror life as well.

    by scotty79
  • Or maybe we could focus on something not world ending for once?
    by boesboes
  • Finally, we built a mirror bacteria from the famous "Don't create a mirror bacteria" paper.
    by tomaskafka

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