James Smith

And so then you'd be creating evolutionary pressure not to eat them.

Once myrrh bacteria got to a relatively high concentration in the environment, then there would start to be evolutionary pressure for things to eat it.

But that means myrrh bacteria are already present at quite a high concentration.

And I think...

Something that's important to underscore is I don't think that mirror bacteria are going to take over the whole world and outcompete all other species.

They only need to be present in the environment at a relatively low level in order to cause these massive risks.

So you inhale about a million bacteria per day.

And even if 1% of those were mirror bacteria, you'd be inhaling 10,000 mirror bacteria per day.

1% is about the prevalence of some of the more common bacteria that we have in the environment.

So it's not crazy to imagine a bacterial species getting to that.

But it really doesn't need them to be 100% of all bacteria for these risks to be the case.

Yeah, I think, to be clear, I'm less worried about this scenario because I think it would play out over a much longer time period.

And so we'd have more time to deal with it.

But there are still pretty interesting scenarios to get into.

We've mostly been imagining a mirror of something like an E. coli, which needs to eat.

food to grow.

And that food is often chiral.

So that gives some limitation on its growth.

But there are bacteria that don't require any food to grow.

So marine cyanobacteria are an example here.