James Smith

Now, putting a right hand into a right-handed glove, it fits well.

It activates the immune system.

But if you try and put a left hand into a right-handed glove, it doesn't work properly.

Mirror life would be a bit like that.

A lot of the interactions that are so fundamental to biology are not going to work in the same way.

Yeah, mirror life would be a type of artificial life that you'd make in the lab.

A mirror bacterium is what we're mostly going to talk about today because that would be the simplest form of life that you'd make.

And it would literally have exactly the same components as a normal bacterium.

So it would have DNA, proteins, ribosomes, a membrane, but all of those would be made in their mirror image form.

Yeah, people have actually posited the existence of mirror life since the 1800s, so it's not a completely new thing.

People have mentioned the risks of it in passing in the literature, but it wasn't until last year that anyone looked into this properly.

And I think this is the worst bio-threat that I've seen described.

And I think it can be on par with AI safety for some people, depending on your skill set.

That's driven a lot by the fact that there are literally probably 10 people working full time to think about the risks from neurobacteria and what could be done to address them.

So it's incredibly neglected.

I also think it's really tractable.

We're used to thinking about technologies like artificial intelligence or nuclear, where you have massive risks, but also potentially massive benefits.

And MirrorLife seems to be an exception to that.

The benefits that we can foresee are really quite minor, whereas we have these massive risks.

And I don't think there are going to be strong commercial drivers to want to make MirrorLife.