The antibodies not being chiral dependent doesn’t mean there aren’t other fundamental links in the whole chain that leads to antibodies being deployed at all that may not be. Mostly I imagine the risk is that we have a lot of systems optimized for dealing with life of a certain chirality. They may be able to cope with the opposite chirality, but less so. COVID alone showed what happens when something far less alien but that is just barely out of distribution for our current immune defenses arrives: literally everyone in the world gets it in a matter of months, a non-insignificant percentage dies even if the pathogen itself would be no more complex or virulent than others we deal with on the daily. And COVID was easy mode. We have examples of far more apocalyptic outcomes from immune naive populations getting in contact with new pathogens.
Here we’re not even talking about somehow innocuous entities. E. Coli can and will kill you if it gets in the wrong place while your defenses are down, no mirroring necessary. Staph. Aureus is everywhere already and will eat your flesh while you still live if given the chance. The only reason why we coexist with these threats is that we are in an armed truce: they can stay within their turf, but as soon as they try and go where they don’t belong, they get terminated with maximum prejudice. Immuno-compromised people have to fear them a lot more. Imagining a version of them that is both antibiotic resistant (because I bet that’s also a consequence of chirality) and able to evade at least the first few layers of immune defenses, until somehow the system scrambles to compensate and manages to churn out a counter-measure, is terrifying enough. That the immune system may eventually cope with them doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be an apocalyptic pandemic (and worse, one that affects man and animal alike, all at once).
The antibodies not being chiral dependent doesn’t mean there aren’t other fundamental links in the whole chain that leads to antibodies being deployed at all that may not be. Mostly I imagine the risk is that we have a lot of systems optimized for dealing with life of a certain chirality. They may be able to cope with the opposite chirality, but less so. COVID alone showed what happens when something far less alien but that is just barely out of distribution for our current immune defenses arrives: literally everyone in the world gets it in a matter of months, a non-insignificant percentage dies even if the pathogen itself would be no more complex or virulent than others we deal with on the daily. And COVID was easy mode. We have examples of far more apocalyptic outcomes from immune naive populations getting in contact with new pathogens.
Here we’re not even talking about somehow innocuous entities. E. Coli can and will kill you if it gets in the wrong place while your defenses are down, no mirroring necessary. Staph. Aureus is everywhere already and will eat your flesh while you still live if given the chance. The only reason why we coexist with these threats is that we are in an armed truce: they can stay within their turf, but as soon as they try and go where they don’t belong, they get terminated with maximum prejudice. Immuno-compromised people have to fear them a lot more. Imagining a version of them that is both antibiotic resistant (because I bet that’s also a consequence of chirality) and able to evade at least the first few layers of immune defenses, until somehow the system scrambles to compensate and manages to churn out a counter-measure, is terrifying enough. That the immune system may eventually cope with them doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be an apocalyptic pandemic (and worse, one that affects man and animal alike, all at once).