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

Yeah.

So they don't have, exactly.

They don't have their own machinery to be able to replicate.

They have to use the host cells machinery.

And so firstly, they'd probably struggle to even bind to the surface of the mirror bacterium, but let's say they could and they inject their genetic material.

into the myrobacterium, that genetic material won't be read by the host cell.

So the ribosome in the myrobacterium won't translate any RNA into proteins or the transcription of the DNA won't work.

So they would be completely immune to this.

And this is something we can be very, very confident in.

It's basically 100%.

Yeah.

So why that's important is because this is a really common source of death for bacteria.

So if they aren't going to be subject to this, they're getting a massive fitness advantage.

And that means they might actually be able to spread in the environment and outcompete other bacterial species as well.

So they might be able to grow in soil.

Well, they might be able to grow in the oceans as well as infecting all of these different species that we talked about already.

So we can be very confident that the bacteriophage won't work.

There are a bunch of other predators that normally eat up bacteria too.

These include amoebae or protists, which basically work like macrophages in the immune system.

They engulf their prey and many mechanisms in that process

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