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Comment by xolox | Hacker News Reader

The potential for unchecked "growth" and potentially fatal infection vaguely reminds me of the terrifying aspects of prion based diseases. Thanks for giving me another theoretical nightmare scenario to worry about in the back of my mind! :-)

Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks (stanford.edu)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42403394

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Prions are real. Don't eat mad cow. Rememeber that boiling prions would not kill them, but burning them to ashes will.

Mirrored bacterias are still just scifi. It's too hard to make one of them for now and some normal bacterias will eat them anyway becuase there are a lot of weird bacterias that can eat some specific varity of crap. One of them will save us [1].

The normal bacterias can have trouble eating the reversed proteins, RNA, DNA and even sugars. But oil/fat don't have this problem! In the worst case, normal bacterias will just steal all the oil and fat from the reversed bacterais and kill them, and we will have to sweep the discarded reversed proteins and burn them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds

Grey goo.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo

AI paperclips

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/ai-and-paperclip-problem

Prions getting into food supply

Nuclear holocaust.

I’m definitely not sleeping tonight. I can see why Gen Z is thinking not to have kids…

Environmental collapse due to climate change is way, way more likely than any of those.

And Nuclear incidents caused by climate/ai extremists are way more likely than those.

Environmental collapse is a convenient, very portable goalpost though.

Lol, no activist is going to cause a nuclear event. It's just easier to accept that than the fact that we're ruining the biosphere.

And a full environmental collapse is not even strictly necessary to end civilization. If the climate perturbation is large enough it will cause a mass migration and an economic disaster, either of which is enough to cause a war.

Can humanity peacefully deal with things like half of China becoming uninhabitable by humans? Dunno but if I had to pit humanity against this or the mirror bacteria I'd choose the latter.

I find it slightly heartening to consider that all biological life is already a long-running Gray Goo apocalypse, and one of the inheritors of that legacy are towering trillion-unit megastructures with eldritch hiveminds were call "people."

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