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Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

the-scientist.com

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Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#211

Post by joshuaissac »

ceejayoz wrote: post #96
joshuaissac wrote: post #5

Why not create mirror viruses to infect these mirror bacteria? And mirror predators to consume the mirror bacteria. Or compound microbes that can eat both mirror bacteria and regular bacteria, so that we can deploy them before we create mirror bacteria. For example, there is already a bacterium that can eat L-sugar, which is a mirror of regular sugar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-Glucose Once the mirror creature i…

> Why not create mirror viruses to infect these mirror bacteria? And mirror predators to consume the mirror bacteria. "No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death."

The risk is of the rhetorical winter taking too long to roll around, and mirror life forms managing to hold on for long enough to gain the ability to feed on non-mirrored nutrients. In the worst-case scenario, with no predators, they could rapidly outcompete and replace the bottom end of the ecosystem, resulting in the collapse of everything above, which would be far worse than the slow-growing infectious diseases described in the article.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#212

Post by Supermancho »

cyberax wrote: post #127
sitkack wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humanity knew very well that lead and mercury were highly toxic and yet only recently are they being phased out in widespread use. The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sm1qxqdRyY Hundreds of millions of pounds of Glyphosate is spread across the entire globe. Scientists don't have much say in these things.

> Hundreds of millions of pounds of Glyphosate is spread across the entire globe. And none of it is harmful to humans.

> > Hundreds of millions of pounds of Glyphosate is spread across the entire globe.

> And none of it is harmful to humans.

As Monsanto assures us, except when https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovKw6YjqSfM (extremists are funny)

To be fair, safety is a matter of concentration and exposure. It's not safe, per se, as with any pesticide. The question is about it's lingering effects.

https://usrtk.org/pesticides/glyphosate-health-concerns/

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#213

Post by kragen »

achierius wrote: post #205
kragen wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Belarus and Kazakhstan are vassal states of Russia now and for the foreseeable future; possibly they will be annexed officially at some point, like the Crimea and probably Donbas. Sweden would probably still be neutral if it hadn't given up its nuclear weapons; it seems to be at significant risk of being invaded by Russia again (it was invaded in the 18th century and again in the 19th), which is why it joined NATO in…

Kazakhstan is by no means a Russian vassal state, and is in essentially no danger of annexation. It's worlds away from Belarus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Kazakh_unrest#7_January

> Tokayev (...) went on to thank Russia for sending troops to help establish order.

> Russia's Defence Ministry stated that more than 70 planes were flying, around the clock, to bring Russian troops into Kazakhstan and that they were helping to control Almaty's main airport.

On the other hand:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan%E2%80%93Russia_rela...

> Kazakh leadership including Kazakh Foreign Minister Mukhtar Tleuberdi did not condemn the Russian invasion and abstained on the UN vote to condemn it, but at the same time they refused to recognize the Russian states of Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic.

> In addition to sending humanitarian aid to Ukraine, the Kazakh military increased spending and training. (...)

> Russia suspended shipments of Kazakh oil after Tokayev’s statements at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, where he stated that Kazakhstan considered the DPR and LPR as “quasi-state entities” and would not recognize them. On the other hand, in spite of some tensions, Kazakhstan's relations with Russia remain strong and mostly friendly, as shown by Tokayev's visit to Moscow in November 2022. (...)

> In 2022, Kazakhstan agreed to share the personal data of exiled anti-war Russians with the Russian government. In September 2022, Kazakh authorities detained a Russian journalist who was wanted on charges of "discrediting" the Russian military. In December 2022, Kazakhstan deported a Russian citizen who fled mobilization.

I'm no expert in foreign relations, but to me, this sounds like the relationship between the Trump administration and the municipal government of Portland, Oregon, not like the relationship between France and Germany, the relationship between Argentina and Brazil, or even the profoundly unequal relationship between the US and Canada. Tokayev can posture a bit about disagreeing with Putin, but Russia will punish him, and when push comes to shove, he depends on Russian military support to stay in power; and when Russian dissidents or draft dodgers show up in Kazakhstan, he arrests and deports them. (Contrast Vietnam-War-era US draft dodgers fleeing to Canada.)

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#214

Post by throwaway0123_5 »

deadbabe wrote: post #117
cj wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans only respond to acute threats. As a society we don’t have a means of effectively responding to long-term threats. We seem to only care about the next 5-10 years. Our species is short sighted, but I suppose evolution will correct that, eventually.

Well the average remaining life expectancy of all adult humans currently alive is probably only a little more than 10 years so it makes sense.

Are you suggesting a massive collapse is likely in ~10 years?

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#215

Post by DocSmith »

XorNot wrote: post #136

This is just Open Philanthropy laundering weird billionaire concerns again. The same people who decided they really needed to warn the world about garage borne designer pandemics (by totally misunderstanding what DNA actually is and does).

Indeed, looking at the sponsors, it's not at all surprising to see that Open Philanthropy is behind it... both directly and indirectly. Moreover, they're trying to hide that fact by burying the reference deep in the supplementary materials behind others AND hiding the fact that their people are in charge of the other involved 'non-profit' organizations. 70+ Scientists don't come together on something like this without a lot of help. We should have better transparency standards for large science publications like this. Seems that neither "Open Phil" nor "Open AI" are being very Open about anything these days. Pitty.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#216

Post by cyberax »

Supermancho wrote: post #212
cyberax wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hundreds of millions of pounds of Glyphosate is spread across the entire globe. And none of it is harmful to humans.

> > Hundreds of millions of pounds of Glyphosate is spread across the entire globe. > And none of it is harmful to humans. As Monsanto assures us, except when https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovKw6YjqSfM (extremists are funny) To be fair, safety is a matter of concentration and exposure. It's not safe, per se, as with any pesticide. The question is about it's lingering effects. https://usrtk.org/pesticides/glyphosate-…

Yeah, yeah. Proof by a video from an eco-terrorist group is the best thing ever.

I would have just punched that smug moron in the face. So kudos for the Monsanto guy.

> To be fair, safety is a matter of concentration and exposure. It's not safe, per se, as with any pesticide.

It actually IS safe at any sane level. The surfactant that is added to the formulations is more dangerous than glyphosate itself.

Sometimes things are just black and white.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#217

Post by fabian2k »

geysersam wrote: post #167
nmstoker wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Life forms are effectively locked into the current set of chiral molecules. For a cell to flip, it would need all the corresponding mirror changes to happen as well, since the behaviours are interlinked - this makes it something that would be highly unlikely to occur due to evolution and why it's only realistic if carried out by people all at once.

That argument would be a good one if the time scale was shorter. But over the course of the entire evolution of life on earth... It's hard to argue that the step from chirality A to B is larger than all the other insanely unlikely steps evolution has taken. From earliest proto-life to complex multicellularity and beyond.

The problem for new life with a different chirality would be that it would have to compete with the existing organisms. And the existing ones are already far, far more optimized than any new kind of life would be. So this is not comparable to the way life originally developed, where no competition existed and the entire environment was very different.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#218

Post by aaroninsf »

No discussion of Peter Watts' Rifters should omit a clear content warning.

It's full of his own fetish, misogynistic sadism, and without kink shaming, I can say this makes these books—which are otherwise interesting and memorable—literally unrecommendable.

Caveat lector

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#219

Post by justlikereddit »

mattclarkdotnet wrote: post #171
philipkglass wrote: post #4

The full report is here: "Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks" https://purl.stanford.edu/cv716pj4036 The premise reminds me of the "Rifters" trilogy by biologist and science fiction author Peter Watts. In it, an archaic deep sea microorganism "ßehemoth" that outcompetes all other kingdoms of life is brought to the surface and wreaks global havoc as it spreads. https://www.rifters.com/maelstrom/…

Peter Watts’ work is indeed bleak, harsh, but brilliant. I thought Blindsight was a hard read but the Rifters trilogy is another level

While Blindsight and Echopraxia had some interesting world building and were both very readable books. It is worth mentioning the "science" part of them as science-fiction novels are essentially just a distillate of the most over-hyped pop-sci singularity-ism memes from the early 2000s era

A combination of "humans only use 1% of the brain" mythos married to a "super cognition unlocks emergent superpowers" results in something that's more accurately described as an unofficial entry in the Marvel cinematic universe than the hard-scifi it styles itself as.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#220

Post by selimthegrim »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #194
gus_massa wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mirror antibiotics must work in mirror bacteria. Mirror proteins should fold exactly like normal proteins, but mirrored. (There may be a problem with the weak force, but I never heard it's used in biology.)

Mirror symmetry breaks down in counter-intuitive ways in physics, that probably bubbles up into the chemistry side of things too. Not always, and not often. Probably just often enough to be confusing, and in this case, starkly terrifying and spirit-crushing.

That is a completely different thing.
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