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.
Easy, Douglas Adams already documented the fate of the Golgafrincham: entirely wiped out by a virulent, fatal disease caught from an unsanitized telephone!
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.
The article about (another) the end of the world is behind a paywall, the tweet about it is behind a login screen - guess I'll find out when it happens!
This sort of thing highlights the most dangerous thing about a high-tech society: people will do ANYTHING to cure a disease they or their loved ones have, even if it means an existential risk that we often have the ability of instantiating.
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.
Nature can't and doesn't try everything. It also potentially discards old things.
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.
Risks have been proposed. Consequences can range from nearly nothing up to world ending. OTOH there is zero upside. Obviously mirror life should be possible but there is no upside in actually making it other than to stroke someone's ego.
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.
>Do we have to fucking discover everything? Don't we have enough already?
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.
It's nowhere close to being possible. To do anything related to life you need to have a lot of complex molecules. When you do things with normal life you can have genetically modified organisms that will produce whatever substance you need in whatever amount you need.
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.
The primary proposed benefit of creating mirror-image organisms is as a means to mass-produce mirror-image forms of molecules that are produced by normal life. Mirror-image molecules have been studied for several decades and may offer a range of potential applications. There is broad agreement among scientists that it is important to distinguish between mirror-image molecules and whole mirror-image organisms. Some scientists argue that chemical synthesis methods are sufficient for creating mirror-image molecules without posing the potentially catastrophic risks of mirror-image organisms.
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.
As a diabetic, I would love "mirror wheat" which behaves like normal wheat (ie can make breads, etc) but has zero carbs/calories because the body can't digest it. Mirror glucose would be nice too, though allulose is already a pretty close stand in for mirror glucose.
We already make use of "mirror" molecules; the idea is that mirror organisms could help efficiently create these for us (like how we can use yeast and fungi etc to create various chemicals).
Of course there is also the whole potential apocalypse scenario
I had read somewhere that it could allow the creation of cures that would not trigger the immune system, since they would use chirality to hide, so to speak.
Yes, we will work on life forms undetectable to the immune system. For uh, checks notes cures. Disregard the fact that the imperial military runs our society.
'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."'
You don't need a mirror image organism to cause great harm. An engineered prion could also be devastating.
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.
Unfortunately, there are several prion diseases already in existence: scrapie in sheep, BSE in cows, Chronic Wasting Disease in deer, and both Kuru and Crutzfeld-Jacob in humans.
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.
Everybody is worrying about the AI torment nexus, meanwhile, we're grinding up cows and feeding those bits to cows and then people eat the cows and go crazy.
I really doubt a "mirror life" bacteria would be "hidden" from the immune system. Antibodies should have enough search space to be able to detect and neutralise such bacteria?
"A sufficiently stereochemically alien pathogen could, in principle, place essentially all of its important antigenic determinants outside the effective recognition repertoire of a conventional adaptive immune system."
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.
Finally, we built a mirror bacteria from the famous "Don't create a mirror bacteria" paper.
Or maybe we could focus on something not world ending for once?
Yeah, what if this behaves like prions?
What do you do for work? I'm sure we can figure out how it also contributes to ending the world, one way or another :)
Challenge accepted.
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.
Easy, Douglas Adams already documented the fate of the Golgafrincham: entirely wiped out by a virulent, fatal disease caught from an unsanitized telephone!
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.
> Challenge accepted.
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.
Captioning? If the company used novel techniques you contributed to the surveillance state, you're welcome
[delayed]
If any life destroys all life, it will be humans destroying all life. So any human promoting act is a contribution to the destruction of all life.
Dolphins are advanced enough, we should let them take it from here.
There's a series of books from Petter Watts that give plenty of good reasons why this might not be the best idea:
- "Starfish"
- "Maelstrom"
- "βehemoth"
>βehemoth
How I read that? Like Ssehemoth or like Behemoth?
I'm glad you asked! Obviously you have to check the code table and you can see that's a Greek beta, not German Eszett. \s
I come to Hacker News for exactly this. Excellent nerdsnipe.
As if you could not tell by the shape of the glyph.
Come on now. I would swear both characters are the same. I didn't know that the German one wasn't a Greek beta.
The article about (another) the end of the world is behind a paywall, the tweet about it is behind a login screen - guess I'll find out when it happens!
In my world, that'd be illegal.
So what bsl is mirror life supposed to be locked up in?
Dupe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49914403
This sort of thing highlights the most dangerous thing about a high-tech society: people will do ANYTHING to cure a disease they or their loved ones have, even if it means an existential risk that we often have the ability of instantiating.
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.
"people will do ANYTHING to cure a disease"
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.
This has the potential to destroy all life.
I'm sure nature has already tried these "mirror" forms, and for efficiency/practicality reasons, discarded them.
Nature can't and doesn't try everything. It also potentially discards old things.
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.
Hyperbole aside, has the risk of this been truly studied?
All I hear is "there's no danger" or "OMG this will kill us all" and in neither case is any reason given.
Risks have been proposed. Consequences can range from nearly nothing up to world ending. OTOH there is zero upside. Obviously mirror life should be possible but there is no upside in actually making it other than to stroke someone's ego.
Yes, as a matter of fact it has been studied. For instance:
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.
>Do we have to fucking discover everything? Don't we have enough already?
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.
Trillions of dollars of investment in this incoming, probably. Can't make a profit without breaking a few planets, you know how it is.
Laboratory leaks have occurred more than once.
It's nowhere close to being possible. To do anything related to life you need to have a lot of complex molecules. When you do things with normal life you can have genetically modified organisms that will produce whatever substance you need in whatever amount you need.
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.
what exactly would we usefully get from doing it?
The primary proposed benefit of creating mirror-image organisms is as a means to mass-produce mirror-image forms of molecules that are produced by normal life. Mirror-image molecules have been studied for several decades and may offer a range of potential applications. There is broad agreement among scientists that it is important to distinguish between mirror-image molecules and whole mirror-image organisms. Some scientists argue that chemical synthesis methods are sufficient for creating mirror-image molecules without posing the potentially catastrophic risks of mirror-image organisms.
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.
[From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror-image_life]
As a diabetic, I would love "mirror wheat" which behaves like normal wheat (ie can make breads, etc) but has zero carbs/calories because the body can't digest it. Mirror glucose would be nice too, though allulose is already a pretty close stand in for mirror glucose.
We already make L-sugars, but they have strong laxative effects.
We already make use of "mirror" molecules; the idea is that mirror organisms could help efficiently create these for us (like how we can use yeast and fungi etc to create various chemicals).
Of course there is also the whole potential apocalypse scenario
I had read somewhere that it could allow the creation of cures that would not trigger the immune system, since they would use chirality to hide, so to speak.
Yes, we will work on life forms undetectable to the immune system. For uh, checks notes cures. Disregard the fact that the imperial military runs our society.
A stronger understanding of organic chemistry.
Stuff our immune system doesn't recognize is potentially useful for things like vaccine delivery. But it's also useful for a potential pathogen.
weapons
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror-image_life
The "Potential Risks" section of the wiki is a bit thin on the mechanisms of the danger.
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."'
You don't need a mirror image organism to cause great harm. An engineered prion could also be devastating.
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.
So that's two things we shouldn't be releasing into the world.
Unfortunately, there are several prion diseases already in existence: scrapie in sheep, BSE in cows, Chronic Wasting Disease in deer, and both Kuru and Crutzfeld-Jacob in humans.
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...
Everybody is worrying about the AI torment nexus, meanwhile, we're grinding up cows and feeding those bits to cows and then people eat the cows and go crazy.
TL;DR: Don't.
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should"
I really doubt a "mirror life" bacteria would be "hidden" from the immune system. Antibodies should have enough search space to be able to detect and neutralise such bacteria?
well, you are the expert!
more seriously: how would it be able search for something it has no experience seeing at all
"A sufficiently stereochemically alien pathogen could, in principle, place essentially all of its important antigenic determinants outside the effective recognition repertoire of a conventional adaptive immune system."
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.