The full report is here:
"Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks"
https://purl.stanford.edu/cv716pj4036
The premise reminds me of the "Rifters" trilogy by biologist and science fiction author Peter Watts. In it, an archaic deep sea microorganism "ßehemoth" that outcompetes all other kingdoms of life is brought to the surface and wreaks global havoc as it spreads.
https://www.rifters.com/maelstrom/maelstrom_master.htm
A good premise (along with others) for a hard SF novel series, but it's bleak. As James Nicoll put it, "Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts."
https://rifters.com/real/author.htm
I see that a substack author has written about this "second kingdom of life" today, under the catchy heading "green goo":
https://denovo.substack.com/p/green-goo-republished
And a commenter there mentioned Rifters also.
I did mention it I think on one of the other discussions on HN that got merged here
> The trouble with mirror cells is that they could probably evade most of the barriers that keep ordinary organisms in check. To fight off pathogens, for example, our bodies must first detect them with molecular sensors.
> Those sensors can only latch onto left-handed proteins or right-handed DNA and RNA. A mirror cell that infected lab workers might spread through their bodies without triggering any resistance from their immune systems.
It’s clear that RNA wouldn’t be complementary to mirror RNA, but antibody binding is more complex than RNA hybridization. Is it a foregone conclusion that antibodies couldn’t bind to mirror antigens?
(Degrading mirror proteins, as mentioned elsewhere in OP, does seem like a bigger obstacle.)
Wouldn't the bacteria be similarly disadvantaged when trying to sense its environment, eat, and reproduce in a completely mirror world?
From the article:
>The downside of having a biology that renders mirror bacteria ‘invisible’ to natural enemies is that they would not be able to consume many of the chiral nutrients found in nature. However, several nutrients, such as glycerol, are achiral (they do not have mirrored forms), and thus could be consumed by mirror bacteria. Well-intentioned scientists could also engineer mirror bacteria that can consume naturally occurring chiral molecules such as sugars and amino acids.
Antibodies can bind to wrong-handed antigens, but an antibody to a correct-handed antigen would not automatically bind the mirror. I'm not finding a lot of literaturee about this, however.
I don’t understand why the innate immune response wouldn’t default to attacking an organism made of chiral molecules, since it attacks anything it doesn’t recognise.
And while the adaptive immune response might not immediately recognise a novel organism, is there something that would prevent it ever adapting?
I’m sure it would attack it, and it likely would even succeed.
The problem is the chiral molecules would be difficult to clean up. You’d have this anti-life bacteria torn to pieces, yes, but then the pieces get stuck everywhere and potentially jam things.
Personally—not a biologist—it doesn’t feel like a huge risk, given we accept threats such as microplastics which do much the same thing. However, it’s a completely unnecessary threat with essentially no upsides, and it wouldn’t be possible to undo once created.
Do we really "accept" microplastics? It seems to me most scientists in the field are terrified of microplastics, while simultaneously acknowledging it's a problem that we almost assuredly can't realistically solve on any reasonable timescale.
I'm confident if we had seen microplastics coming when we first started using plastics, science at least would have tried to prevent their use becoming as widespread as it has.
Humanity knew very well that lead and mercury were highly toxic and yet only recently are they being phased out in widespread use.
The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sm1qxqdRyY
Hundreds of millions of pounds of Glyphosate is spread across the entire globe.
Scientists don't have much say in these things.
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 generated that binds to it and becomes a longer lived cell.
Presumably this could still happen but this normally takes days to happen. In between your inate immune system relies on being able to recognize a lot of existing antigens that are out there and common in attackers.
Having the entire library of malicious life become magically unknown means that you are relying on only your adaptive immune system is available to contain the damage.
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)
Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42403886
A 'Second Tree of Life' Could Wreak Havoc, Scientists Warn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42403886
Since that thread didn't make the front page, we'll merge those comments hither. Interested readers may want to look at both articles.
How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; at which point everyone is left flat footed by having not researched it.
> How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it;
This is a function of how easy it is to do the banned thing, how easy it is to detect when it is being researched and what are the benefits of researching it.
Imagine as an example that we live in a world where there are no firearms, and we decide to ban their research and development. All three factors would be against the ban. It is relatively easy to make primitive firearms (all you need is metal working tools). It is hard to detect when someone is doing it (they can keep their firearms secret, and the tools and activity disguised as something else) and the firearm once developed will be of great benefit to whoever developed it.
So a blanket ban against firearms would be unstable. It wouldn't work.
Let's look at an other example. Nuclear weapons. They are much harder to create (you need a whole industrial project to develop the tech, lot of engineers, and lot of energy consuming processes), there are pre-cursor technologies you can monitor to have an early warning (uranium enrichment, centrifuges, etc), it doesn't have immediate benefits unless you also develop a reliable delivery mechanism for it.
And these are the factors while nuclear weapons don't proliferate everywhere. You can't buy them in the mall, smaller countries don't have them etc.
I don't know what the answer to these questions are for "mirror life" but the framework is the same.
How hard is to develop it? If a single dude in a shed can do it, there is probably no point banning it. It will happen sooner than later. If it requires coordinated effort from multiple research groups and industrial partners, then a ban might work.
How hard is detect when someone is developing it? Can they hide it? Is the process using common materials and equipment? Do they need to get stuff only people who develop mirror life would need?
But the final question is the most important: What do they win? If there is some military benefit to developing "mirror life" then we are lost, and it will be developed. If there is some big economic benefit a ban might work, but it will be an uphill battle. If there is no benefit to it, and it is just cool and interesting to do, it will be a lot simpler for a ban to hold.
That's a great framework for assessing it, thank you!
It seems to me that to a degree nuclear weapons show some of the problems with a research ban. I think that it's possible that nuclear weapons are proliferating just very slowly. The problem seems to be that once someone engages in forbidden research, then their rivals feel the need to as well. E.g. we allowed China to get a nuclear weapon so India decided they needed one which led to Pakistan needing one. More currently, we allowed Israel to get nuclear weapons so now Iran is likely trying to get them.
It's also notable that the two instances where people gave up nuclear weapons, Gaddafi and Ukraine; have both ended poorly for the people who gave them up.
All this to say, I wonder if it might be possible to slow research on a subject but not to stop it completely.
Several other countries also gave them up with better results. Including South Africa, Sweden, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
There is no benefit to disease as a weapon they aren't containable nor faster than nukes.
You unleash green too ensuring your targets liquidation in 6 weeks they inform you to share your own defense against it or get nuked tomorrow. You share it but it adapts and everyone dies.
> How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; at which point everyone is left flat footed by having not researched it.
Someone's going to need to work it out, because if the problem of "how to ban existentially dangerous things" is not solved, eventually we'll be fucked.
And realistically, we're probably fucked, because humanity probably simply lacks the maturity to not fuck itself over at some point (e.g. because of the logic "if we don't do it someone else will" is scarily effective, and some people are just unhinged for really stupid reasons). We probably only made it this far because of external constraints limited what we could do.
Part of me thinks it may turn out that a that a full-scale nuclear war that knocks out industrial civilization (especially if it's followed by A Canticle for Leibowitz-style anti-intellectual social changes) may not be such a bad thing in the long run, if it buys humanity a few more millennia.
We don’t research what happens when a child falls out of a plane and nobody feels like we’re falling behind for it.
I think that the difference may be that there's relatively little benefit or desire to researching children falling out of planes and we have fairly easy ways to study the question indirectly (accelerometers, cadaver studies, animal studies, etc.).
Also, there are numerous examples throughout history of people performing evil human studies; so while people may not have studied children falling from planes, people have studied equivalent things.
We actually did, it's a solved problem.
Research bans do not inherently work.
Treaties need enforced, and the Streisand effect and arms-race dynamic play into the game theory as well.
There is no potential profit in researching that, this isn’t the case with mirror chirality organisms.
Without directly addressing your proposed experiment, the history of aviation was filled with all sorts of grotesque experiments on humans. Absolutely disgusting stuff, like suffocating people to simulate high altitude flight. There was an ethical quandary about whether to use this data (IE, as citations).
but would a ban really stop somebody from trying?
If you can't get funding for your research, or publish under your real name if you do, it's certainly going curtail research at least. It could still happen if some nations refuse to endorse the ban, but there will at least be less of it, which means less risk.
That is to say, our enemies will master it first and we will be caught with our pants down.
We're not talking about a targeted weapon, we're talking about accidentally unleashing an unstoppable global pandemic. If only China is risking that, the odds are better for everyone.
Why wouldn't they make it into a targeted weapon? Us humans turn everything else into a weapon.
Because wiping out all of the world's importers/exporters would cripple China.
If they somehow survive of course.
We are talking about an all-infecting pandemic. You can certainly weaponize it, if you think global collapse sounds fun. What you can't do is target it.
By something liable to end human life when it inevitably adapts?
It actually makes sense to just go ahead and go to war with anyone who works on such weapons.
How much achiral food would be available for these bacteria anyways in nature? They'd have to compete for it with all other life.
You also have to consider the risk, however small, that mirror bacteria released in the wild survive just long enough to naturally evolve to consume the common chiral form of whatever molecule. We've observed that bacteria can evolve rapidly to changing environments, so it's not out of the question.
Besides the achiral glycerol mentioned in the article, some bacteria subsist on methane. That is also non-chiral and in large quantity in petroleum and under the sea.
So thats why we were made to extract fossil fuels and "dispose" plastic and research bacteria. Hope Life 2.0 writes footnotes about biped cities making plastic mines like we write about Jurassic shellfish providing soil suitable for US cotton.
I life has to completely restart on this planet, there probably won't be time for things as complex as us to evolve again before the sun turns into a red giant.
Searching HN for "mirror cells", I see at least 1 article warning of the dangers from more than 10 years ago. So, this has been a thing for a while. Any biologists here that can chime in on just how big of a risk they do pose? Is there a general consensus throughout the community that this research should end? Is this something that could be developed for bio-terrorism? Should work be started on developing mirror immune system cells, just in case?
no. antibodies will work just fine on a d-protein and one of their mechanisms of killing is to generate ozone, which is an achiral molecule.
there is currently ~no risk because generating mirror life is such a monumental task. we dont have a full biological bootstrap sequence currently. even syn1.0 which was a synthetic genome transplant and rebooting operation, required a living host cell to transplant the DNA into, and the genomic dna does go from a computer file, but only the smallest ~100 bp fragments are made by robots and chemistry; intermediate fragments are assembled and amplified in enzyme reactions, bacteria, and yeast.
in principle you could get these to be entirely in vitro, but the yields would be nearly nil. and the expense of mirror dna monomers is... i can't even imagine. you'd probably bankrupt a midsize nation on that. and theres no motivation to decrease the cost because there's not really any other practical use for mirror dna outside of fucking around scientifically. and thats just the DNA. our ability to synthetically make proteins taps out at around 150-200 residues (maybe 2-4x that if you can get clever with native chemical ligation) and the purification and isolation at that length is truly a nightmare, not to mention refolding longer sequences is also hard.
I don't think anyone is worried about mirror proteins by themselves, they are worried about someone assembling a self-replicating/self-propagating mirror life, no? In which case, the fear is that you can't just run around ozone-ing every little colony of chiral-mirror version of cyanobacteria under every rock in remote Siberia or wherever.
1. > Should work be started on developing mirror immune system cells, just in case?
2. by way of direct response to your question. mirror nutrients (like scavenged AAs, even for autotrophs) are liable to be very scarce so they'll have one hell of a disadvantage makimg it on this world.
A completely "mirrored" organism is not that dangerous.
- It would still have antigenic properties, just not the ones we are familiar with, because antigens are proteins or proteins bound to sugars. Both have "left" vs "right" variants.
- It can't eat any ordinary food, except simple fats. Common proteins and sugars won't fit it's enzymes. That means it can't digest sugars, proteins or any combination that contains them. It also means it can't attack and decompose our tissues, so it would have no way to enter our bodies.
- With only simple lipids as food, it would need to take all Nitrogen from the atmosphere or inorganic compounds, which means it can't really be a pathogen for humans (or any animals) even if it could somehow enter our organisms. However, it could live on the soil and possibly be a plant pathogen.
- It's "mirrored" toxins won't have any effect on us. (But compounds that are normally benign possibly could be toxic if "mirrored" - I can't say for sure if it's possible.)
Mirror life would have no interoperability with normal life, in biochemical terms. Say, if a predator attacked a mirror bacteria, and ate it, it would be just like eating an inedible microplastic particle. A technological analogue would be to change tensions in electric outlets at random, between 115V and 230V standards, with no indication of which outlet has which tension. People would start blowing equipment left and right.
More specifically, it would have no interoperability with the portions of life that target chiral molecules.
Most critically, metabolic pathways.
But that isn't to say there isn't already varied chirality in nature [0]. The primary reason life is generally aligned to one chirality is because its very purpose is to interoperate with the living environment around it.
>> Mirror life would have no interoperability with normal life, in biochemical terms.
That sounds like a good thing but... Our food chain starts at the bottom with bacteria turning nutrients into bio-molecules right? These bacteria are eaten by other things going up the food chain ultimately to us. What if some bacteria got loose at that bottom level and started eating all the nutrients with no natural predators? What if it out-competed those with predators? That might be game over for life as we know it.
I'm NOT saying this would happen, just that it one of thousands of possible scenarios one can come up with that go very badly. No one can say with certainty which things would or would not happen.
It would be way worse than micro plastic and closer to your 115v example.
The parts would be similar enough to form bonds and trigger receptors, but different enough to become permanently stuck, unable to be processed.
Why not create mirror viruses to infect these mirror bacteria? And mirror predators to consume the mirror bacteria. Or compound microbes that can eat both mirror bacteria and regular bacteria, so that we can deploy them before we create mirror bacteria. For example, there is already a bacterium that can eat L-sugar, which is a mirror of regular sugar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-Glucose
Once the mirror creature is big enough, it will not matter that it is an indigestible mirror creature, as the predator will eat it regardless. So we only need to create mirror predators up to a certain level.
> Why not create mirror viruses to infect these mirror bacteria? And mirror predators to consume the mirror bacteria.
"No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death."
Microscopic organisms mutate rapidly and unpredictably, so this sounds like a "swallow a spider to catch the fly" situation.
Mirror bacteria evolving the ability to eat normal sugar would be the killer.
How about we make mirror prions that affect/infect mirror bacteria, but are inert to us? It becomes a targeted therapy.
"Let's make synthetic prion diseases!" sounds like a phrase that'd make a biologist shudder.
Did Star Trek not already warn us about this one?
There's this meme about how sci-fi cautionary tales fly over people's heads,
> At long last, we have finally created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel "Don't Create the Torment Nexus".
Don’t forget its thrilling sequel, “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus, Again”.
Clarke warned us, in "2061: Odissey 3" (Beware: spoilers):
> The doctor seemed to be struggling for words. 'What, dammit?' 'Something came up out, of the water, Like a parrot beak, but about a hundred times bigger. It took - Rosie - with one snap, and disappeared. We have some impressive company here; even if we could breathe outside, I certainly wouldn't recommend swimming -' 'Bridge to Captain,' said the officer on duty, 'Big disturbance in the water - camera three - I'll give you the picture.' 'That's the thing I saw!' cried the doctor. He felt a sudden chill at the inevitable, ominous thought: I hope it's not back for more. Suddenly, a vast bulk broke through the surface of the ocean and arched into the sky. For a moment, the whole monstrous shape was suspended between air and water. The familiar can be as shocking as the strange - when it is in the wrong place. Both captain and doctor exclaimed simultaneously: 'It's a shark!' There was just time to notice a few subtle differences - in addition to the monstrous parrot-beak - before the giant crashed back into the sea. There was an extra pair of fins - and there appeared to be no gills. Nor were there any eyes, but on either side of the beak there were curious protuberances that might be some other sense organs. 'Convergent evolution, of course,' said the doctor. 'Same problems, same solutions, on any planet. Look at Earth. Sharks, dolphins, ichthyosaurs - all oceanic predators must have the same basic design. That beak puzzles me, though -' 'What's it doing now?' The creature had surfaced again, but now it was moving very slowly, as if exhausted after that one gigantic leap. In fact, it seemed to be in trouble - even in agony; it was beating its tail against the sea, without attempting to move in any definite direction. Suddenly, it vomited its last meal, turned belly up, and lay wallowing lifelessly in the gentle swell. 'Oh my God,' whispered the Captain, his voice full of revulsion. 'I think I know what's happened.' 'Totally alien biochemistries,' said the doctor; even he seemed shaken by the sight. 'Rosie's claimed one victim, after all.' The Sea of Galilee was
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.
If this was ‘Starfish’ it was longer than a short story
I don't think so; I've looked up the story, and what I remember doesn't match the setting of the summary I've seen of that novel — assuming it was the Peter Watts novel, because while I kinda assumed you wouldn't have meant the Lisa Fipps novel of the same name, there may be others with that name which I just don't know about.
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
I also saw a 2-part documentary recently about someone who caught a highly contagious virus (the so called "rage" virus) that led to disastrous consequences. We know these risks are real.
There was a fairly recent issue of the Fantastic Four about this as well.
(where "fairly recent" means part of Ryan North's excellent run)
Surprised nobody mentioned ‘Starfish’ by Peter Watts.
Some scientists in the Manhattan Project worried that the first nuclear test could trigger a chain reaction that would annihilate the earth.
These fears were unfounded.
(Granted, atmospheric nuclear weapons testing has its own set of subtle consequences that are gradually becoming more well known.)
I don't quite understand the meaning of your comment, it reads to me like "one time people worried about something but their worries were unfounded" with the subtext/implication that "therefore we don't need to worry" - about this? Or maybe need to worry in general? Or is it just to feel a bit more optimism that not every doomsday fear ends up coming to fruition?
> Or is it just to feel a bit more optimism that not every doomsday fear ends up coming to fruition?
Exactly.
I suspect mirror-image molecule life hasn't evolved because it wouldn't be fit enough to be self-sustaining.
Many invasive species get into new ecosystems only with human help. They can’t do it on their own, but once they’re there… Asian carp and zebra mussels.
But that's just one example of scientists warning about something and being wrong; it's just an anecdote that you can't draw much from.
> These fears were unfounded.
Sure, but it's good to prove that one out before pressing the button.
No, they calculated the likelihood of this as being acceptably low. Are you criticising that they checked?
Conversely, Great Filter.
If you have the technological proficiency to synthesize mirror chemistry cells from scratch, I'm hoping that implies you also have the ability to engineer e.g. bacteria that feed on reverse chirality molecules & turn them back into standard form, or create other mitigations. Safer not to make them at all though.
A short story/cautionary tale on this very subject: https://laprade.blog/your-dietbet-destroyed-the-world
This reminds me of the different foods in Anathem; the different people (Trying to keep this spoiler-free.) are unable to digest the the foods the others eat.
So you are saying if by chance a normal bacteria was mutated into chiral/mirror we’d be wiped out? I’m sure there was such events in nature before
Not really possible via mutation. Mutation only impacts the genetic code, swapping chirality means swapping nearly every molecule in the organism all at once.
Basic biochemistry question (you can tell what I didn't study in uni)
Is it possible to mix chirality in, say, a protein?
I.e. have a portion of one chirality and another of the other?
You can make these things in a lab. However Phind said "In summary, while scientists have proposed various models for how biological homochirality may have emerged, there is currently no known example of mixed protein chirality occurring in nature. Biological molecules appear to exhibit almost exclusive homochirality at the molecular level."
It makes sense, I guess. Why would something natural want to interact with both chiralities of a target? Usually there's a reason for one... and the other is unrelated.
Yes. Some bacteria have D-amino acids (such as D-alanine) as part of their cell walls (which otherwise contain almost entirely L-amino acids). D-amino acids are also sometimes incorporated into drugs that are synthetic peptide mimics in order to slow metabolism.
> D-amino acids are also sometimes incorporated into drugs that are synthetic peptide mimics in order to slow metabolism.
Thanks! I think that was the notecard in a dusty corner of my mind that was nagging.
d-ala is not incorporated into the protein main sequence (it's part of a D-ala D-lac sugar)
it is possible to have mixed chirality in syntheic proteins. (see michael weiss work investigating insulin receptor binding to insulin)
its basically impossible (but not totally impossible) for a living creature to be able to generate any protein with mixed chiralities.
this is because a ribosome with a chamber that can support both chiralities is likely to be less efficient at protein extension. but also you need so much more trna if you want to support arbitrary d-amino acids, etc.
Yes, that can be created in principle, but you would need to modify the natural machinery (ribosome and tRNA) to make it possible.
Not sure what you mean by "in a protein", but if you have a solution of some chiral chemical compound such that there's 50% of the L-enantiomer and 50% of the R-enantiomer, you get what's called a "racemic" mixture. So, yes -- mixing chirality is possible in at least one sense.
What’s more realistic in the near-term is that conventional gain-of-function research creates a terrible, conventional bacterium that’s more deadly than Ebola and resistant to all of the antibiotics that we mass produce.
If there was an advantage to being opposite-handed, some bacterium would have done it by now. The article even says that researchers just found out that e-coli can consume different-handed food.
I’m guessing that the first discovery in this area, the ambi-vory of e-coli, is not really all that unique. Medical and biological science is still just scratching the surface. They’re still cataloguing new components of human anatomy, things you could have found with a microscope centuries ago… It is highly unlikely that out of the universe of billions of years of bacteria, e-coli is the singular organism that went down this route to the furthest extent that was advantageous. The fact that they found one example with their limited resources tells me that this is not so improbable.
The fear-mongering just sounds like a funding push to me. The basic research will be enriching for humanity, if it doesn’t create the very thing from which it purports to save us, though I’m thinking this messaging is a bit out there. Could you engineer a super-bioweapon this way? Probably. But there are easier ways to do that with information that’s already in the textbooks.
Now we have another candidate to explain the Fermi paradox. Mirror Biology Armageddon. Even if life outside runs on alternative biochemistry, the odds are that some of its building blocks are chiral too, and subjected to the same risks in case the indigenous intelligent lifeform advances to the point of making mirror life.
The potential for unchecked "growth" and potentially fatal infection vaguely reminds me of the terrifying aspects of prion based diseases. Thanks for giving me another theoretical nightmare scenario to worry about in the back of my mind! :-)
Related:
Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks (stanford.edu)
Prions are real. Don't eat mad cow. Rememeber that boiling prions would not kill them, but burning them to ashes will.
Mirrored bacterias are still just scifi. It's too hard to make one of them for now and some normal bacterias will eat them anyway becuase there are a lot of weird bacterias that can eat some specific varity of crap. One of them will save us [1].
The normal bacterias can have trouble eating the reversed proteins, RNA, DNA and even sugars. But oil/fat don't have this problem! In the worst case, normal bacterias will just steal all the oil and fat from the reversed bacterais and kill them, and we will have to sweep the discarded reversed proteins and burn them.
Grey goo.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
AI paperclips
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/ai-and-paperclip-problem
Prions getting into food supply
Nuclear holocaust.
I’m definitely not sleeping tonight. I can see why Gen Z is thinking not to have kids…
Environmental collapse due to climate change is way, way more likely than any of those.
And a full environmental collapse is not even strictly necessary to end civilization. If the climate perturbation is large enough it will cause a mass migration and an economic disaster, either of which is enough to cause a war.
Can humanity peacefully deal with things like half of China becoming uninhabitable by humans? Dunno but if I had to pit humanity against this or the mirror bacteria I'd choose the latter.
And Nuclear incidents caused by climate/ai extremists are way more likely than those.
Environmental collapse is a convenient, very portable goalpost though.
Lol, no activist is going to cause a nuclear event. It's just easier to accept that than the fact that we're ruining the biosphere.
I find it slightly heartening to consider that all biological life is already a long-running Gray Goo apocalypse, and one of the inheritors of that legacy are towering trillion-unit megastructures with eldritch hiveminds were call "people."
Sounds like the warnings about GMO.
In the mean time, they tried using mRNA vaccines that did mimic our own mRNA, but they caused immune reaction. Substituting a different nucleoside and made the vaccine more stable. The way pseudouridine is used in mRNA vaccines isn't found in nature, ergo people who have been vaccinated are already carrying around bit bit of a form of life never seen before on the planet.
tRNA has a lot of weird nucleotices. I expect no problem with another one, but I'm not a biologist.
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_RNA
> A large number of the individual nucleotides in a tRNA molecule may be chemically modified, often by methylation or deamidation. These unusual bases sometimes affect the tRNA's interaction with ribosomes and sometimes occur in the anticodon to alter base-pairing properties.