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Mirror bacteria are just like the normal bacteria around us every day, except if you look at them under a microscope they all have evil looking goatees.
Oh, great... Certainly no laboratory in some Les amicable country will continue this research to try to take a stab at fame....
Oh, new Rimworld ~~war crime~~ mod idea!
What, another one? Look we're already several kinds of risk to all life on earth - it's way too late to get hung up on it just because another one was added to the pile. I mean it's not like genuine but dangerous research won't exploited by the same rich bastards already exploiting all the rest of mankind's genuine but deadly research. Throwing another one on the bonfire won't change it.
And here I thought my late 2024 anxiety level was maxed out already.
It gets worse. They are also working on mirror physics, where they launch orbiting observatories made of antimatter. What could possibly go wrong.
Antimatter does not replicate the way microbes do to be fair. It's dangerous to handle in large enough amounts obviously, be we don't have the energy to produce enough to create a serious danger nor the technology to store that amount at once.
Anyone feeling freaked out by this doesn't have anything to worry about. There's nothing you and I can do to stop the research. Go on and enjoy your life.
The thing about that is if all this is for is research then I could have some hope that they'd actually stop.
If someone thinks there's profit to be made and that's what is driving the research then it's never going to stop unless they go bankrupt or it proves to be worthless... What happens to the world at large doesn't matter one bit to people chasing profit :(
Ahh yes, man made horrors beyond our comprehension
Proteins and DNA and their mirrored counterparts behave like the Tetris L and ⅃ blocks, basically the same but you cannot rotate them to fit in a hole meant for the other. Fitting in holes is, somewhat literally, how most processes of life work on the sub-cellular level.
Processes like the immune system. And if an experimental microbe from mirrored DNA doesn't fit in the holes your immune system uses to identify things, because all the proteins curve the wrong way, there's no telling how it behaves, even if the unmirrored version is one of the most studied organisms. And it's not just your immune system, it's every living things' one. And 1 microbe alone is a potential pandemic.
I am no expert, but I hope the horror is comprehensible now. If not, I imagine minuteEarth's video on mirrored molecules is basically the same reasoning here, with the caveat that mirrored DNA tends to make more of itself.
The incomprehensible part was that we don’t know how bad things can get if this stuff got out into the wild. I got the chiral parts lol thanks for the further explanation
Well, at least I finally understand how Death Stranding began.
I get the fear but what about those of us that want a Symbiote-suit?
I can comprehend this one perfectly, actually.
It really is more of a fear of the unknowable than a horror beyond comprehension, isn't it?
Sure. Why not. Add it to the pile.
"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another." ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer
I am NOT a religious man but I'm a strong believer that we are so eager to play God we are forgetting to ask the important questions around if we should.
Personally speaking I think we need to pause on things like this, or AI as another example. We have proven repeatedly we lack the maturity as a species for what we are learning.
That said, you can't put everything back in Pandora's box so for everyone reading this sharing my concern, YOLO and cover your head and wait for the worst.
Edit - the biggest threat to humanity is our unyielding curiosity.
AI is one of those things that's stupidly overblown. The true downsides to AI are it's uses in spreading misinformation and it's enormous environmental impact. When companies are buying nuclear plants for enough electricity, the whole thing has gone off the rails. There are other downsides but those two are the largeat to me. In short though, we've nothing like true AI anyways so playing god is a stretch.
Edit: tbf I do understand your point and find it valid.
Or do it offworld at least, wired up to a dead man's switch connected to like...a nuke. Nobody infected can leave, and any localized research or pathogens are crisped and blown apart.
Like, seriously, we only have this one green planet for potentially hundreds of light-years around us, which even at the speed of light would take us centuries to reach another earth-like world. We really cannot afford to damage this lifeboat in a vast sea of barren, rocky islands devoid of life, water, or food.
Even climate change is mind boggling to think about, when you realize there's no alternatives anywhere even close. Even with incredibly optimistic technology breakthroughs, we are still centuries away from travelling outside this solar system and making it to the next closest star system (light-years away).
I think the only way to grow past our immaturity is to break out of our boundaries as human. I'd rather try than stagnate with all our flaws into extinction.
But is it not our curiosity that defines us? What separates us from machines, outside of needing to sleep, if we don't have our curiosity, our passion for the unknown? It's not like we can only have a little curiosity, curious enough to try a new meal but not to work towards breakthroughs that might unlock ways of bettering our lives.
How else would we have gotten all of our vaccines without people "playing god"? I think while the garbage AI is a bit scary, it's not the AI part that terrifies me, it's the coldness "the economy" has towards people's livelihoods, otherwise AI is nothing special in pushing forward or downfall as a society, it's just highlighting something that was always there, a class conflict
It's like that old saying ... Just because we can doesn't mean we should.
This seems like something that really is a minimal risk. Pathogens are pathogens because they are able to make use of our bodies as raw materials to reproduce. Unless they are able to make use of both enantiomers in their biology, there's little benefit to dedicating resources to colonizing us.
Probably a bigger concern would be outcompeting and displacing organisms lower on the food chain.
If mirrored microbes require mirrored antibodies to be killed that is something no living thing on earth has the ability to create.
What?
Fire, alcohol, bleach, etc. Would all still disinfect.
Immune systems would still work. They detect anything "foreign". Immune system reacts to a metal splinter just like it would for wood or a parasite.
Absolutely. Conversely, if mirrored microbes aren't able to make use of building materials in hosts that are mirrors to them, pathogenicity makes little biological sense (microbes don't make us sick out of spite). Now, if they could, that would be a problem. Even if not, they could fatally disrupt the gut microbiome.
The scope of what I suspect to be the greater danger, I've, perhaps understated. Suppose mirror bacteria "escape" and are able to thrive in the surrounding environment. As you note, known life has not evolved to be able to defend against it. This introduces the possibility of the artificial bacteria displacing the natural ones. Since the biosphere involves more complex organisms feeding on the smaller ones, it is plausible that the entire food web could be disrupted, leading to extinction of extant complex life, unless adaptation occurs quick enough.
Do you have credentials in this field, or are you just kind of guessing? Because, no offense, but I'm skeptical of random people on internet forums contradicting literal scientists.
Good point, though I find the part of the commentary relevant:
Although we were initially skeptical that mirror bacteria could pose major risks, we have become deeply concerned. We were uncertain about the feasibility of synthesizing mirror bacteria but have concluded that technological progress will likely make this possible. We were uncertain about the consequences of mirror bacterial infection in humans and animals, but a close examination of existing studies led us to conclude that infections could be severe. Unlike previous discussions of mirror life, we also realized that generalist heterotroph mirror bacteria might find a range of nutrients in animal hosts and the environment and thus would not be intrinsically biocontained
It's cool, America has RFK Jr. So...
...it's not cool, actually