James Smith

speaker

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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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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

It was kind of surprising to me initially how...

common these features of immunity are across all different multicellular life.

But I think the thing is that no multicellular life has had a reason to evolve to be able to deal with mirror life because it's never interacted with it.

So in a way, it makes sense that this would be an evolutionary blind spot for it.

There's no reason why it should be able to detect it.

But I think a lot of people initially have an intuition that the immune system is just really good at dealing with any arbitrary threat.

In fact, it seems like that wouldn't be the case here.

Yeah, definitely.

Myrobacteria could really damage a lot of habitats, drive potentially a lot of multicellular species to extinction, and might even change things like geochemical cycling.

So we've talked about the... Yeah, we'll get into all of it, I hope.

But we've talked about the immune system defects.

So there's the direct impact on animals that could, of course, impact ecosystems.

But myrobacteria would also escape common forms of predation.

So normal bacteria are killed by viruses all the time.

There's about 10 times the number of bacteriophages, which are viruses for bacteria, than there are bacteria in the world.

So these are literally everywhere.

And they would not be able to infect myrobacteria.

The reason is that mirror bacteria wouldn't be able to read the genetic code of the viruses.

So the way that viruses replicate, they don't have their own machinery.

Okay.

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