James Smith

So we could do it for crops and a lot of the food that we plant directly ourselves.

But doing that across other environments, other plant species, seems like it would be a really difficult undertaking.

Yeah, I think this is a really hard question, but...

I think we could protect at least relatively small populations of humans and enough food for us to be able to survive as a species.

Beyond that, I think it's really hard to say.

I mean, hopefully we just don't get to this point and we focus on prevention, which I do think is much more important for most people.

But I think we can protect against the very worst harms.

And so people working on this and thinking through some of these measures in more detail, I think could make a really big difference.

Yeah, it's a good question.

And the answer is that

There's no stepwise process through which mirror life could evolve from normal life that would be advantageous to the evolving organism throughout that process.

So normal life is on one fitness peak.

Mirror life could be on another fitness peak.

There's a valley that you have to cross in between.

And all of the steps that you go through would be harmful to the organism.

So if you try and incorporate mirror amino acids into normal proteins, it makes them fold.

It makes them fold.

in weird ways and not work properly.

So the whole organism is going to kind of break when this stuff happens.

One good analogy, I think, is driving.