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.
Incorrect. There are symmetric achiral molecules. Which can be consumed as food for both normal, and mirror life, thus creating competition for resources.
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.
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,
“ 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.”
> 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.
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.
Non-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.
A 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.
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.
Mirror 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
There'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.
35 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 47.9 ms ] threadOn 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.
See p.14 of https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/cv716pj4036/Technical%20Rep...
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.”
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.
The confidence with which people say utterly asinine things...
2. Mirror chloroplasts may be able to use achiral small molecules to form mirror biological macromolecules, like normal chloroplasts.
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.
One of my favourite short stories, it’s always stuck with me since it was posted to HN a few years ago.
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?
Aren’t Prions scary enough?
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.
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.
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.