On Sat, Apr 5, 2025 at 5:32 PM Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
* Mirror life at the viral level has probably occurred many times in the > history of the Earth but quickly disappeared because it couldn't compete > with established life. Why the concern now?* > *Because evolution moves in very small steps so any form of mirror life that came about today by natural means would be very primitive and be quickly overwhelmed by the vastly more sophisticated regular life; however if an AI picked a particularly tough fast growing generalist species of modern regular life, Escherichia coli for example, and made a mirror life version of it and released it into the wild then it would quickly become a doomsday invasive species. If the AI wanted to make it work even faster it could genetically engineer chemical pathways in it so it could eat plentiful chiral nutrients, such as the sugar d-glucose.* *The mirror life version of a bacteria would be as feeble or robust as the regular life version of it that served as the template. For example, every healthy human being has about 38 trillion Escherichia coli bacteria in their body, normally they causes no problem but if, for whatever reason, our immune system fails to keep them under control and those numbers get too high then that bacteria can make us sick or even kill us. * *And we know from experiments that Escherichia coli can grow very quickly in an environment that only contains molecules that look the same in a mirror, that is to say in an environment without chiral nutrients, if there is nothing like an immune system to keep the numbers down. The same would be true for mirror Escherichia coli. And the human immune system would not recognize a mirror version of Escherichia coli, and the same would be true for every animal on the planet. That's because an immune system recognizes a bacteria or a virus by the chiral molecules on its outer wall. So without an immune system to keep things in check there would be a population explosion of mirror Escherichia coli in the animal. And that would result in the death of the animal.* *For more read the article that I mentioned before in the December 12, 2024 issue of the Journal Science: * *Confronting risks of mirror life <https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads9158>* *John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>* 5x0 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv2FNOU_y%3DiDKZGwnK31ga1x4UAdXgL8B1da%3DSvBA0eDsQ%40mail.gmail.com.
