James Smith

No, I think all the work that's happened already for therapeutic purposes doesn't pose any special risk.

It poses the same risks as any new drug development.

So it might have

things that you didn't predict would happen yeah but it can't self-replicate and so i don't think it's particularly dangerous where the line should be between those and mirror life is a really difficult question and one of the key open questions i think at the moment in the discussion around mirror life that we'll probably talk about in a minute

I think the risks from making mirror life would just be far greater than the benefits that you'd get from being able to develop better countermeasures.

But even more than that, we've already talked about how mirror experiments can tell you a lot about mirror life.

So if you want to develop a countermeasure against mirror life, one way to do that is to make mirror life, and this is the way that I don't endorse, is to make mirror life and then test countermeasures against it.

The other thing that you could do is use normal life as a model organism and make mirror countermeasures against normal life.

That means if there was ultimately a mirror life outbreak, you could just take the mirror of the countermeasures that you've developed and scale that up instead.

In a way, we know a lot about myrobacteria and how they would behave because physics tells us exactly what would happen.

It would behave in the same way as normal life in isolation.

And that's a really unusual property.

We can't usually reason so effectively about something that doesn't yet exist.

But I think that reduces the benefit of going ahead and making it.

And some people think...

No, I don't think so.

But the reason for that is

The type of mirror life that we're talking about here, that all the analysis that's been done is focused on, is an exact mirror of life on Earth.

It's not something that would have some mirror components and look a bit like what we have on life on Earth, because the special risks come from the fact that mirror life is already well adapted to living on Earth, because it gets to benefit from all this evolutionary history.

It's vanishingly unlikely that an exact mirror of life on Earth would evolve on a different planet.