some reasons to not freak out about this entirely speculative please do not trust anything I say in any directionhttps://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1420989331242557448 …
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3. even supposing they could somehow survive if they escaped it would be possible to engineer them to have a very difficult time living outside a lab environment by removing their ability to synthesize essential molecules independently
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suppose life uh. finds a way our oceans are now choked with mirror cyanobacteria this isnt good but it can probably be mitigated at least
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4. if we can synthesize mirror cyanobacteria we can certainly synthesize mirror cyanophages. cyanophages are viruses that specialize in killing cyanobacteria. mirror cyanophages would only be able to infect mirror cyanobacteria this might effectively check their growth
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5. there exist non-mirror enzymes that break that break down mirror glucose and there's a well-understood way to transfer enzymes to bacteria so we just seed the ocean with anti-mirror glucose enzyme and that lets bacteria consume it after all
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6. I have no idea what de novo enzyme design is like right now but by the time we figure out fully synthetic life--ehhhhh maybe we have protein design figured out too. so we might not be limited to known natural enzymes for breaking down mirror molecules as in (5)
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