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.
>monitoring, verification, and other early-stage deterrence tools.
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?
It definitely seems like a zoomer thing.
I don't actually know why this faded and got gradually replaced by our quite specific rules. It seems like a nice way for an author to be able to express much more meaning in the exact same number of characters.
Ha! HN makes it italic. I forgot that.
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.
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.
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.”
See p.14 of https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/cv716pj4036/Technical%20Rep...
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.
Whatever caused life to begin in the first place would maybe be the right place to look to recreate this naturally. If life began again from step 0, but with the opposite chirality, it could then progress forward towards mirrored bacteria.
One of my favourite short stories, it’s always stuck with me since it was posted to HN a few years ago.
I'm not sure what advantage you see to a government in restricting this.
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.
Quite the opposite: It damages beyond repair the ability to pick out proper names at speed.
English has a horrid habit of re-using common nouns as names. The miller John becomes John miller, not John Miller.
Worse, the proliferation of brand names means that readers depend on capitalization to know if they are talking about, e.g., google, a common generic term for searching, or Google, the Alphabet (not alphabet!) subsidiary.
So, under the new regime, authors get to be more precious at the expense of their audience's time and concentration.
That's a Nope from Me, Dawg.
Many things can have chirality: big things like gloves, and small things like drugs. The concept is not alone is not 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, 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)