It may soon be possible to create "mirror life"(economist.com) |
It may soon be possible to create "mirror life"(economist.com) |
I worked for this company that did telephone service for the hard of hearing. It was a phone that could go very loud. It also captioned the far end of the phone call, in case the user couldn't pick out all the words, even with the high volume.
I await your world-ending scenario for that tech and/or company.
- "Starfish"
- "Maelstrom"
- "βehemoth"
How I read that? Like Ssehemoth or like Behemoth?
In [1]: ord("β")
Out[1]: 946
In [2]: ord("ß")
Out[2]: 223In my world, that'd be illegal.
How do we solve the housing crisis?
If both sided life was prevalent early on, and one outcompeted the other, it may have gone extinct a billion years back. New life would have some difficulty evolving in an environment where existing life is well established.
All I hear is "there's no danger" or "OMG this will kill us all" and in neither case is any reason given.
1. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads9158?referrer...
2. https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/mirror-life-experiment-d...
The detailed thinking has been published in high-ranking journals like Science. And even if the risk is relatively small, isn't that already a good enough reason not to cross this border. Do we have to fucking discover everything? Don't we have enough already?
The craziness of some people who want to know everything is beyond my comprehension.
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.
Or to make a couple of bucks. Reading that mirror-image sugars could work as calorie-free sweeteners feels like foreshadowing for the end of the world.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror-image_life#Potential_ri...
'In December 2024, 38 scientists, including several synthetic biology researchers and two Nobel laureates, warned that the creation of mirror-image life could cause "unprecedented and irreversible harm" to human health and ecosystems worldwide. The reversed structure of mirror-image bacteria could allow them to evade many mechanisms critical for immunity and predation that have evolved to recognize natural-chirality structures. As a result, mirror-image bacteria could potentially escape immune defenses and invade natural ecosystems, leading to "pervasive lethal infections in a substantial fraction of plant and animal species, including humans."'
I don't think preons are technically mirror molecules, but it's close enough from a risk perspective. If rogue AI were to do us in through bioengineering, it might be by creating a novel prion.
more seriously: how would it be able search for something it has no experience seeing at all
In one example, the mirror molecules would likely cause some sort of localized inflammation or other lesion, and then the immune system would be attracted to the area, generating trillions of combinations of randomized protein sequences. If within that trillion there is just 1 antibody that can bind to the mirror life, the immune system will duplicate that molecule many times, and they will bind to the mirror molecules, recruit other proteins that will isolate and degrade them, and then remove them from the body.
Due to the complexity of protein structures, antibodies can bind to mirror molecules.
Every time I show a computer scientist this system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination they remark, "Wait, nature uses self-modifying code? It generates trillions of random combinations, shuffles them around, finding the best ones, and then amplifies them? You know that sort of sounds like this CS technique called genetic algorithms" at which point you just stare at them until the exclamation point above their head goes "BINGO"
With perfect knowledge of the immune system and the capability to create the pathogens of our dreams it would most likely be possible to create this pathogen of our dreams.
Making an entire self replicating mirror organism that would both have this property of "being invisible to the specific immune system" and AND being an effective pathogen is far from a solved problem though. It's further away as useful quantum computing!
We don't even have self replicating mirror cells, just some synthetic Frankensteins.
Potential applications of mirror-image molecules include:
Enantiopure drugs: Some pharmaceuticals show different activity depending on enantiomeric form.
L-ribonucleic acid aptamers: Artificial oligonucleotides that are constructed from the mirror-image versions of their natural forms. L-RNA aptamers are highly resistant to degradation by nucleases and are currently being tested in clinical trials.
L-glucose, enantiomer of standard glucose: Tests showed that it tastes likes standard sugar, but is not metabolized the same way. However, it was never marketed due to excessive manufacturing costs. More recent research allows cheap production with high yields; however the authors state that it is not usable as a sweetener due to laxative effects.
Of course there is also the whole potential apocalypse scenario
Isn't that the point of science? To discover things? I don't think we know enough already.
Now should we pursue this specific dangerous research direction? Probably not. But I don't think broad statements like "we have enough already" are warranted.
I do worry that much mass not being digested would be trouble for you though.
You thought you were enabling communication(already dangerous as per the babel fish!) but you were ensuring the means of transmission!
But seriously though, sounds like a fun job where the byproduct of your work improved the experiences and access of people, and thats pretty great.
Ironically, this is the type of mindset of scientists that do this type of dangerous research. Just to see if it’s possible, with no concern of ethics ever bothering them.
Dolphins are advanced enough, we should let them take it from here.
And in all cases your salary will be taxed to fund weapons and warfare no matter what work you're doing.
Your fingers alone can kill. Everything is a weapon. Don't ignore that fact. Seek to empower the evil doer that is doing the least evil. Do gooders don't run for office.
Perform a series of primary safety experiments on board, determining whether mirror life truly does evade immune systems, predation, decomposition, or other biological check mechanisms.
If the safety experiment results are alarming, the spacecraft is not just far past Earth but has a powerful explosive on board and can be detonated in deep space. Any living matter scattered by the explosion would be destroyed by solar and cosmic rays, and it's not coming back to Earth anyway.
A maybe cheaper but slightly less intensively confined solution would be to do it deep underground with a tactical nuke on hand to turn the results into radioactive ash encased in bedrock if the results are alarming.
I think we should do this, since it's obvious that the technology to create mirror life exists. If it is existentially dangerous we should find out under highly isolated conditions. If it's not we can breathe a sigh of relief, and if it is we can take appropriate regulatory action before someone oops-es it.
Scrapie is incredibly durable in the environment; the prion toxins can remain transmissible in the soil for a decade, causing disease years after it was shed by its previous host.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmissible_spongiform_encep...
"Cattle are believed to have been infected by being fed meat-and-bone meal that contained either the remains of cattle who spontaneously developed the disease or scrapie-infected sheep products...
"The British Government enquiry took the view that the cause was not scrapie, as had originally been postulated, but was some event in the 1970s that could not be identified."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...