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

I think it is quite counterintuitive, but it just kind of happens that when you get into the details of what's going on, it seems to be true.

I think one way to think about it is that

To cause harm, all a mirror bacterium needs to be able to do is grow.

And we can be pretty confident that it would be able to grow because we know that there are enough achiral nutrients in the body, so ones that don't come into mirror image forms.

And as long as it can grow, it's ultimately going to cause harm.

Whereas for a human immune system to be able to respond to merobacterium effectively, it needs to be able to recognize that it's there.

And the processes by which it recognizes the merobacterium are likely to fail.

Yeah.

The first question I had when I heard about mirror life was, I don't get it.

Like, what would it eat?

I think this is a question that a lot of people have actually.

So a lot of nutrients do come in left and right handed forms, but not all of them.

Some of them are achiral.

And an example of an achiral object is a sphere.

So you reflect it in a mirror.

and it looks exactly the same.

And if you think about the hand into a glove analogy, this would be more like a hand holding a ball.

The ball kind of looks the same regardless of which hand you are.

And nutrients can be like that too.

So in the human blood, you have things like acetate, acetoacetate, glycerol, succinate, pyruvate, all of these are achiral nutrients that are present in quantities that it looks like would be enough to support growth.

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