James Smith

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922 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 13 Jan

James Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #233 – James Smith on how to prevent a mirror life catastrophe · 13 Jan 2026 podcast

Myrobacteria might be able to persist in the environment directly.

So they might be able to grow in soil or in oceans.

It could be like living on Earth today without an immune system, or even like living on Earth today with an immune system, but where you could catch Ebola from trees or from your pet cat.

To cause harm, all a myrobacterium needs to be able to do

is grow.

How much would it cost to make Mirror Life from where we are today?

People estimate something like 500 million to a billion dollars would be sufficient.

That motivates the need to have these discussions now.

I think at the moment, the marginal impact of an extra person working on Mirror Life is huge.

You could probably become the expert in policy around Mirror Life in your country within a few weeks or months.

It's great to be here.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, it might seem like a trivial difference, but actually this is a really fundamental break from normal biology.

So ever since the last universal common ancestor, four billion years ago of all life on Earth, all of our DNA has always been made up of right-handed building blocks, meaning that it makes double helix that twists to the right.

And mirror bacteria would have the opposite.

They'd have DNA that twists to the left.

So introducing it to earth would be a bit like introducing an alien invasive species that nothing on earth has evolved to deal with.

To take one specific example, our immune systems

need to be able to recognize pathogens when they get into the blood to be able to mount an effective response.

The way that it does that is through receptors that you could think of like gloves.

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