A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life

enos_feedler

I thought they were concerned with people living on their devices. Like a mirror digital world. Too bad.

largbae

Ah, another edition of "Don't Create the Torment Nexus". Expect startups to race for a demo of mirror life soon!

analog31

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.

layla5alive

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.

ls612

Would dextro bacteria even be able to infect levo based life? Or is this just some fearmongering about bio to give more power to the government?

figbert

Extremely relevant: https://www.hoover.org/research/biosecurity-really-strategy-...

fnord77

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.

kibwen

Leaving this here for no particular reason: https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#prelude

dash2

If mirror bacteria could spread and avoid the body's immune defences, why has it not already evolved?

Eddy_Viscosity2

So, my first time learning that mirror life is a thing and about its terrifying implications. I guess that's enough internet for today.

msarnoff

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.

gradschool

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.

chuckadams

Are the mirror bacteria sporting tiny little goatees?

reafev

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?

paxys

So the proposed "strategy" is – don't do it, and ask others nicely not to do it. Good luck with that.

roomey

Written about as sci-fi in "Change Agent" by Daniel Suarez. Which is a good book in my opinion

AIorNot

God, Mirror Life sounds like something out of a bad Star Trek Episode… Humans can barely handle our current rate of technological progress..

Danox

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?

txrx0000

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.

Angostura

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.