this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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Futurology

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Yes, it's a stupid idea with almost zero practical applications at the moment. Doing it "just to see if we can" with all the dangers being raised and shouted about it is just absolutely stupid.

Unless, y'know...maybe someone is a in a hurry to get a shortcut to engineered life they can enslave.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

Hey man, robots are great and all, but how do I know it's truly my slave unless it is capable of suffering?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

I'm pretty sure that scifi has been warning us of mirror worlds for quite some time now lol

[–] threelonmusketeers 2 points 3 weeks ago

There is no guarantee that we’ll have immunity to such things. There’s no guarantee that they won’t eat up everything in the ecosystem.

Given that all the sugars that currently exist in the ecosystem would be the wrong enantiomer for them to eat, I think we can be reasonably confident that they won't eat up everything.

Both forms of life (or proto-life) must have existed in the early days of the Earth, and eventually one chirality won out. If we create 'mirror life' today, it would be the same as existing life, just severely maladapted to its environment.