A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life

tthunderbong about 4 hours ago 47 commentsRead Article on rand.org

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Discussion (47 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

layla5alive•about 2 hours ago

This is the first time I've seen one of these proposals which highlights a future potential harm and then makes the healthy proposal for radical open COOPERATION and mutual self-restraint instead of a surveillance panopticon and tyrannical oppression as the solution. Bravo!

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.

MostlyStable•37 minutes ago

I'm curious what solutions to Future threats you think qualify as a panopticon, and why the following set of words in this context don't make you worried about the same:

>monitoring, verification, and other early-stage deterrence tools.

justin66•about 2 hours ago

I’m sure smart and well intentioned American leaders will act for the global collective good, since that’s totally the way things work now.

kraken_cult•about 2 hours ago

off topic but I've noticed this CAPITALIZATION more and more in online discourse. I don't like it, but if you're using it can you maybe explain where it comes from?

It definitely seems like a zoomer thing.

blooalien•15 minutes ago

In "old-school" Internet "netiquette" it used to be considered digital SHOUTING. Nowadays it still is in some circles, but it may just be considered emphasis by some of the younger crowd?

arjie•about 2 hours ago

Every time I see it I think of those YouTube videos people used to make: Ben Shapiro OWNS feminist with FACTS and LOGIC. Definitely sets the bozo bit.

fhdkweig•about 1 hour ago

It is for this reason that I like people doing it. I refer to it as setting "the evil bit". Go ahead and let me know that you only spout garbage before I even click the link.

somenameforme•about 2 hours ago

One could argue that it's just what's old becoming new again. In older English capitalization of words was often used to add emphasis or imply meaning beyond what could be conveyed in a sentence by itself. For instance from the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

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.

1attice•about 1 hour ago

> 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.

mettamage•about 2 hours ago

I don't get it though. If you want to create emphasis why not use asterisks?

Ha! HN makes it italic. I forgot that.

Cider9986•about 1 hour ago

You can use two to make keep asterisks like *this*

wat10000•about 2 hours ago

El presidente does this a lot. Maybe it’s leaking out.

DANmode•about 2 hours ago

It’s against the guidelines because it’s been used for emphasis (with varying degrees of classiness) since before the beginning of the Internet.

close04•about 1 hour ago

The proposal tries to go against the current trend of US isolationism which burned a lot of good will with the rest of the world, and gain a bit of soft power back. Noble goal, but I’m not sure who wants to align behind the US today and risk getting dumped tomorrow.

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?

adrian_b•11 minutes ago

One could design a mirror life form that uses mirrored amino-acids to build its proteins and also mirrored carbohydrates as building components, but which would nonetheless also have enzymes for the hydrolysis of normal proteins and carbohydrates and for their oxidation in order to produce energy, so it could eat non-mirrored food as a source of energy, even if it would need to synthesize for its growth mirrored molecules.

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.

chradams•about 2 hours ago

Why do you think such an approach would work, but something equivalent to try to prevent mass shootings / school shooter type gun violence wouldn't? Or would you say that radical open cooperation and mutual self restraint led by governments could stop the American problem of mass shootings like the Las Vegas shooter?

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.

chuckadams•33 minutes ago

Are the mirror bacteria sporting tiny little goatees?

andy99•13 minutes ago

worse, both mirror and normal bacteria have taken to wearing tiny chin-covering scarves so there’s no way to even tell which is which at a glance.

reafev•22 minutes ago

I understand the risk of mirror life i.e. mitochondrion that eat mirror sugar molecules.

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?

gradschool•35 minutes ago

A great science fiction premise could be that a technologically advanced adversary genetically engineers mirror life people to work as spies and saboteurs at wiping out the rest of the population so they can have the world for themselves, but they get rumbled by dogs specially trained to sniff them out or various other means that might surprise and delight the reader. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the difference between the smell of an orange and a lemon is down to the chirality of a single molecule.

figbert•about 2 hours ago

Extremely relevant: https://www.hoover.org/research/biosecurity-really-strategy-...

msarnoff•about 1 hour ago

See also “Your DietBet Destroyed the World” https://laprade.blog/your-dietbet-destroyed-the-world

One of my favourite short stories, it’s always stuck with me since it was posted to HN a few years ago.

dash2•about 1 hour ago

If mirror bacteria could spread and avoid the body's immune defences, why has it not already evolved?

alyeska2•about 1 hour ago

This isn't something that could be caused by a mutation in a single nucleotide or a segment being deleted or inserted, the way normal mutations happen and get passed on. This would be an entirely different set of (mirrored) machinery composing (mirrored) structures from (mirrored) subunits.

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.

Terr_•about 1 hour ago

Because it's too much of a lift at once. To naturally get a mirror E-Coli you'd need a separate planet and billions of years and lots of luck.

It's a mostly-incompatible change to all the machinery all the way down.

kiwibyproxy•about 1 hour ago

because as it was never observed to date, it could be assumed it does not exists yet, as the the article makes it sounds like it's very artificial / constructed

3eb7988a1663•about 1 hour ago

I swear I read of pharma companies experimenting with this. The idea that because the molecules are so foreign, the body lacks enzymes to breakdown the product, so the drug gets a much longer half-life than would be typical.

conartist6•about 1 hour ago

The underlying property is called "chirality" and describes why a left glove and a right glove are meaningfully different from each other even though they have the same topology.

Many things can have chirality: big things like gloves, and small things like drugs. The concept is not alone is not 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, 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)

Eddy_Viscosity2•about 1 hour ago

So, my first time learning that mirror life is a thing and about its terrifying implications. I guess that's enough internet for today.

largbae•about 3 hours ago

Ah, another edition of "Don't Create the Torment Nexus". Expect startups to race for a demo of mirror life soon!

GPerson•about 3 hours ago

I just assume the worst people in the world will have all the power and push for the most deranged reality possible, and somehow routinely get surprised when it’s twice as bad as I imagined.

antonvs•about 2 hours ago

Ad companies need mirror life to create mirror ads that can bypass ad blockers.

Avicebron•about 2 hours ago

Welcome to the information age, where the perpetual hype brinkmanship knows no bounds.

HeWhoLurksLate•about 2 hours ago

Welcome to the automation age, where the bleeding edge gets ever bloodier

analog31•about 2 hours ago

Except in the world of "anything is possible," mirror life would have no food. All biomolecules are chiral.

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.

aguasdemarco•about 2 hours ago

This is something which has been thought about by those in the field, and the conclusion is that it’s probably possible to engineer an organism with an ample food supply,

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.”

trebligdivad•about 2 hours ago

That was the belief - but it was found it was possible to grow E.coli on non-chiral molecules that are commonly available. The worry then is that the immune system will ignore the wrong-chirality infection.

See p.14 of https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/cv716pj4036/Technical%20Rep...

halflife•about 2 hours ago

Incorrect. There are symmetric achiral molecules. Which can be consumed as food for both normal, and mirror life, thus creating competition for resources.

HelloMcFly•about 2 hours ago

> Except in the world of "anything is possible," mirror life would have no food. All biomolecules are chiral.

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.

greygoo222•8 minutes ago

> All biomolecules are chiral.

The confidence with which people say utterly asinine things...

enos_feedler•about 3 hours ago

I thought they were concerned with people living on their devices. Like a mirror digital world. Too bad.

kibwen•about 2 hours ago

Leaving this here for no particular reason: https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#prelude

ls612•about 2 hours ago

Would dextro bacteria even be able to infect levo based life? Or is this just some fearmongering about bio to give more power to the government?

MattPalmer1086•about 1 hour ago

Maybe it could, maybe it could not. If it could and we had no defence against, it could be disastrous, even world ending (for us). The precautionary principle applies.

I'm not sure what advantage you see to a government in restricting this.

fnord77•about 2 hours ago

Non-threat. Life has evolved and re-evolved thousands if not millions of times. One of those iterations would have been mirror biology if it were viable.

Terr_•about 1 hour ago

> Life has evolved and re-evolved thousands if not millions of times.

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.