How is it that some tiny number of man made mirror life forms would be such a threat to the millions of naturally occurring life forms, but those millions of naturally occurring life forms would not be an absolutely overwhelming symmetrical threat to those few man made mirror forms? This whole analysis seems to be assuming that the man made mirror forms will have some grossly asymmetrical advantage.
How is it that some tiny number of man made mirror life forms would be such a threat to the millions of naturally occurring life forms, but those millions of naturally occurring life forms would not be an absolutely overwhelming symmetrical threat to those few man made mirror forms?
Can’t you ask the same question for any invasive species? Yet invasive species exist. “How is it that some people putting a few Nile perch into Lake Victoria in the 1950s would cause ‘the extinction or near-extinction of several hundred native species’, but the native species of Lake Victoria would not be an absolutely overwhelming symmetrical threat to those Nile perch?”
There are many orders of magnitude between hundreds and millions. Also, perch are near the top of the food chain, while these mirror life forms would be near the bottom.
The advantage is that they would have neither predators nor parasites, and their prey would not have adapted defenses to them. This would be true of any organism with a sufficiently unearthly biochemistry. Mirror life is the only such organism we are likely to create in the near term.
I have a similar intuition that if mirror-life is dangerous to Earth-life, then the mirror version of mirror-life (that is, Earth-life) should be about equally as dangerous to mirror-life as mirror-life is to Earth-life. Having only read this post and in the absence of any evidence either way this default intuition seems reasonable.
I find the post alarming and I really wish it had some numbers instead of words like “might” to back up the claims of threat. At the moment my uneducated mental model is that for mirror-life to be a danger it has to:
find enough food that fit its chirality to survive
not get killed by other life-forms
be able to survive Earth temperature, atmosphere etc etc
enter our body
bypass our immune system
be a danger to us
Hmm, 6 ifs seems like a lot, so is it unlikely? in the absence of any odds it is hard to say.
The post would be more convincing and useful if it included a more detailed threat model, or some probabilities, or a simulation, or anything quantified.
A last question: how many mirror molecules does an organism need to be mirror-life? is one enough? does it make any difference to its threat-level?
How is it that some tiny number of man made mirror life forms would be such a threat to the millions of naturally occurring life forms, but those millions of naturally occurring life forms would not be an absolutely overwhelming symmetrical threat to those few man made mirror forms? This whole analysis seems to be assuming that the man made mirror forms will have some grossly asymmetrical advantage.
Can’t you ask the same question for any invasive species? Yet invasive species exist. “How is it that some people putting a few Nile perch into Lake Victoria in the 1950s would cause ‘the extinction or near-extinction of several hundred native species’, but the native species of Lake Victoria would not be an absolutely overwhelming symmetrical threat to those Nile perch?”
There are many orders of magnitude between hundreds and millions. Also, perch are near the top of the food chain, while these mirror life forms would be near the bottom.
The advantage is that they would have neither predators nor parasites, and their prey would not have adapted defenses to them. This would be true of any organism with a sufficiently unearthly biochemistry. Mirror life is the only such organism we are likely to create in the near term.
The asymmetric advantage of bacteria is that they can invade your body but not vice versa.
I have a similar intuition that if mirror-life is dangerous to Earth-life, then the mirror version of mirror-life (that is, Earth-life) should be about equally as dangerous to mirror-life as mirror-life is to Earth-life. Having only read this post and in the absence of any evidence either way this default intuition seems reasonable.
I find the post alarming and I really wish it had some numbers instead of words like “might” to back up the claims of threat. At the moment my uneducated mental model is that for mirror-life to be a danger it has to:
find enough food that fit its chirality to survive
not get killed by other life-forms
be able to survive Earth temperature, atmosphere etc etc
enter our body
bypass our immune system
be a danger to us
Hmm, 6 ifs seems like a lot, so is it unlikely? in the absence of any odds it is hard to say.
The post would be more convincing and useful if it included a more detailed threat model, or some probabilities, or a simulation, or anything quantified.
A last question: how many mirror molecules does an organism need to be mirror-life? is one enough? does it make any difference to its threat-level?