A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life
rand.org
rand.org
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.
It definitely seems like a zoomer thing.
/* mkevil {filename} */
#include <errno.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#define S_EVIL 0166600 /* not evil at all */
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
struct stat st;
if (argc != 2) {
fprintf(stderr, "Missing filename to make evil\n");
return 1;
}
if (stat(argv[1], &st) != 0) {
perror("stat()");
return 2;
}
if (chmod(argv[1], st.st_mode | S_EVIL) != 0) {
perror("chmod()");
return 3;
}
return 0;
}
(But yeah, it's also disappointing when otherwise good content of good other creators is spoiled by some terrible junk. It's the ethical equivalent of selling out to private equity and pretending "nothing has changed".)
Ha! HN makes it italic. I forgot that.
In my opinion it's more elegant than emphasizing with capital letters.
I don't actually know why this faded and got gradually replaced by our quite specific rules. It seems like a nice way for an author to be able to express much more meaning in the exact same number of characters.
Quite the opposite: It damages beyond repair the ability to pick out proper names at speed.
English has a horrid habit of re-using common nouns as names. The miller John becomes John miller, not John Miller.
Worse, the proliferation of brand names means that readers depend on capitalization to know if they are talking about, e.g., google, a common generic term for searching, or Google, the Alphabet (not alphabet!) subsidiary.
So, under the new regime, authors get to be more precious at the expense of their audience's time and concentration.
That's a Nope from Me, Dawg.
[1] bless their hearts
I am no Zoomer and use it, so the casual age discrimination is seemingly poor pattern recognition.
Further, I used to run a hefty BNET(SCBW) swarm (to give you a better reference for how much text from online users I have come across) and it's use was common then as well.
The best solution to text bothering you is to tell yourself that giving silly things such power is, also, a silly thing.
The preceding 'also' could be all-capped.
I don't see how you stop terrorism (of the school shooter type, not the Islamic/political type) with inter-government cooperation. Mirror life is just another vector for school shooters but with PHDs.
Mass shootings, on the other hand, is a shocking but tiny problem that only kills about 350 people a year in the USA.
Much of the bleeding edge research around mirror life is occuring at Westlake University in Hangzhou.
Why not? Have anyone tried to negotiate with the Chinese about that, without tariffs, sanctions and other threats?
> Much of the bleeding edge research around mirror life is occuring at Westlake University in Hangzhou.
Good that they aren't hiding it. As for other countries, the lack of information doesn't mean lack of research, it's all hush-hush secrecy. Again, the current bio-treaties are a bad joke, negotiating new ones requires good will and peace, not trying to choke the oil supply to China.
On the topic of mirror life, doesn’t it need mirror food? I was under the impression that they couldn’t consume natural sugars for example, and so on. They’re talking about mirror life that uses non-mirrored molecules to propagate? How is mirror life building itself without mirror-everything-else?
Mirrored amino-acids and carbohydrates are not completely missing in nature, some of them are produced by certain living beings for various purposes, but they are not used for building proteins or other macromolecules, i.e. they are not usable for growth.
I am wondering if the concern is that the evolutionary pressure from not having abundant mirror food triggers mutations that make it “ambidextrous”.
>monitoring, verification, and other early-stage deterrence tools.
The mirror bacteria has to somehow perfectly dodge all of the countless non-mirror things that can kill it (even unintentionally, like a byproduct molecule that just happens to blow it up or get in the way of reproduction), but somehow still be able to execute its own mirror-biomechanism to kill non-mirror things. And every step of the kill mechanism would also have to perfectly dodge non-mirror things interrupting it.
Not that it can't be done in theory, but it would be easier to just make a normal superbacteria, or maybe even nanobots.
How? They would have never been introduced to such mirror organisms, except potentially (but not certainly) around the formation of life 4 billion years ago.
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?
A good example of the risks of mirror chirality is thalidomide - thalidomide has two enantiomers (one that provides sedative and anti-nausea effects and another that causes the infamous thalidomide birth defects) which the human body naturally flip-flops when administered.
The risk to reward ratio is negatively misaligned (edited) when factoring the catastrophic risks and how easy it would be to weaponize (either on purpose or inadvertently).
One of my favourite short stories, it’s always stuck with me since it was posted to HN a few years ago.
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.
See p.14 of https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/cv716pj4036/Technical%20Rep...
e.g in this report
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads9158
“ Achiral nutrients are available in quantities sufficient for growth of common bacteria in a wide range of natural environments, including within potential hosts (1). Further genetic engineering could provide mirror bacteria with pathways needed to consume abundant chiral nutrients such as d-glucose. Growth of mirror bacteria outside of the laboratory is therefore plausible. However, their interactions with other lifeforms would differ profoundly because of their reversed chirality.”
Many essential biomolecules, nutrients, and amino acides are achiral (e.g. carbon dioxide, water, ammonium, phosphate, sulfate, glycine, and more). Mirror organisms could easily - at least in the realm of plausibility - function as autotrophs to convert sunlight, CO2, etc. into organic sugars, or extract energy from inorganic materials like hydrogen or iron paired with CO2.
The confidence with which people say utterly asinine things...
2. Mirror chloroplasts may be able to use achiral small molecules to form mirror biological macromolecules, like normal chloroplasts.
Aren’t Prions scary enough?
How sure of that are we, really? I'm just a grump on the internet, so what do I know, but it sure seems like that's a huge assumption to be making.
Perhaps we should fund some research to make sure of this? For a long time, all Swans were White, until they weren't. If we do find extant mirror life, we can all rest easier knowing it's unlikely to cause the end of the world, since it hasn't gotten us yet.
It would be far better to find it, and document where and how it already works, wouldn't it? I know that goes against the funding paradigm we have, but that's shit anyway.
The kill decision book is particularly apt at the moment.
Many things can have chirality: big things like gloves, and small things like drugs. The concept is not alone a danger. The concept of a thing which could take our raw materials, disassemble them, and recompose them in a way that would deny us the use of those resources, that is the stuff of sci fi horror thriller.
It sounds like the first thing that should be done is to contact Hollywood to make a really terrifying movie.
In the sequel Russia will have bred a new generation of opposite-chirality humans and will be racing to colonize space first.
(The big in-joke will be that they all wear the same gloves)
It's a mostly-incompatible change to all the machinery all the way down.
It's not just about the food/excretions of the hypothetical cell, but about whether its structure and innards are things the rest of the ecology can detect/defend-against/consume.
Whatever caused life to begin in the first place would maybe be the right place to look to recreate this naturally. If life began again from step 0, but with the opposite chirality, it could then progress forward towards mirrored bacteria.
I'm not sure what advantage you see to a government in restricting this.
From scratch, on the most basic enzymatic level? Nonsense, there's no evidence for that.
> Non-threat.
Most of the things that ever existed are dead, yet plenty of them could absolutely wreck humanity if magically reintroduced into an unprepared system.