241–250 of 253 posts
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That is to say, our enemies will master it first and we will be caught with our pants down.
This sort of rhetoric is disgusting, and likely the exact sort that will lead to mass death incidents in our lifetime. I hope you think about that when such comes to pass.
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> 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-…
Sugar is perhaps safe, there is a test for diabetes during pregnancy that consist in drinking a (small) glass of very concentrated sugar solution. I think it's not a full glass, so don't try it without medical doctor authorization and supervision.
A glass of food oil? Does it give you diarrhea?
A glass of alcohol? It's like two glasses of vodka. I think you get alcoholic coma or worse.
Also, the level of purification is different for food/medicine and other applications. Don't try to eat the salt that is sold to clean snow.
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Prove it. Prove that there's not some corner case where a mirrored molecule stops behaving chemically the same towards other mirrored molecules.
The technical term is "parity simetry" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parity_(physics) that means that a system and the mirrored version behave exactly in the same way. Chemistry is about electromagnetism, and electromagnetism has parity symmetry. Also gravity is somewhat important, but gravity also has parity symmetry. And even the strong force has parity symmetry. So for all practical purpuses, chemistry has parity…
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Why? You know how averages work?
Life expectancy and median age (didn't find average but I assume it is pretty close) were the first things I checked when I read your comment, but life expectancy globally is in the 70s and the median person about 30. I don't understand how the average person could have only a little more than 10 years left.
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Thus we can conclude military will make them. And they will escape.
We really can't. Militaries in particular aren't into bioweapons. Too hard to aim. They're pretty much strictly the domain of terrorists, and terrorists don't have the resources to execute attacks on the bleeding edge of biotech. Remember, no one has built a regular cell from scratch, much less come close to building a mirror cell.
E.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Aral_smallpox_incident
https://www.fredericknewspost.com/archives/what-went-wrong/a...
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/25/world/russian-scientist-d...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/07/23/army-a...
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Stuff binds to other stuff because the magnetic domains and shape match up well enough. There is no way to effect something that attacks everything it doesn't recognize because a) there is no ooeration that represents not matching and b) if there was such a cell would be a short lived bomb that would blow up your body. You adaptive immune system learns to and antigen when a short lived immune cell is semi randomly ge…
Magnetism does not play a role in binding in biology. The primary determinants of binding are: shape complementarity, electrostatic interactions, van der waals forces, and some amount of hard to explain entropy. (biomagnetism is a thing, but I'm not aware of any cases where binding occurs due to magnetic forces)
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I think for the purpose of this topic, we only care about the nutrition (to use your word) question. We can assume humans can intelligently bootstrap past the other abiogenesis problems. And surely this shouldn't be a difficult question to answer, right? Put an autotroph (the simplest that we know of) in a test tube and give it a ever-stricter diet and observe how far you can go without it dying off.
mimimal prototroph media is glucose, phosphate, ammonium, and trace metals that you just assume are in the water source. this is called m9 media. many known organisms can live on m9, including iirc bakers yeast and e coli. if its fully autotrophic you dont need to add glucose. i think some forms of nocardia can live on m9 minus glucose. of course anything that can live on m9 has way more genes in it just to biosynthe…
If this is such a powerful niche for an organism to be in, why haven't they already emerged naturally over the 3 billion year history of life on earth?
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads9158#sec-1
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Not that I recall — closest I can think of would either be TOS evil twin made from antimatter, the mirror universe in general, or Nelix' coffee. But I have seen it as a short story about how the world ends, some synthetic bacteria that was meant to be reversed chirality for safety, but eventually it went wild and could eat everything without itself being eaten by anything.
Yes. I remeber that one too. It started with reversed sugar used for weight loss. It was made by reversed ecoli, which escaped. This is it: https://laprade.blog/your-dietbet-destroyed-the-world
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https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads9158#sec-1
I'm not particularly happy about that argument. It perfectly explains why complex organisms like bacteria don't suddenly evolve to its mirror image. But it doesn't explain why this hasn't happened at a much earlier stage in the evolutionary history.
So even if some mirror life chemistry was going on at some point, it just didn't make it along with all the other things that didn't.