Thank you, and glad to see this reposted, this is a very interesting article.
I've been trying to learn more about biosecurity and especially about how biosecurity professionals model and think about the world. Out of curiosity, why was this article considered an infohazard? It seems to me that this would be quite the advanced feat of bioengineering and that anyone with the means and knowledge to accomplish it would also already know that it is a possibility. It also seems to have limited utility as a bioweapon, beyond being a literal doomsday weapon. This does not seem to be something that current well-known, active terrorist organizations would be massively interested in, as their goals generally do not involve destroying the world.
Another unrelated question- why hasn't a "mirror organism" been produced through natural evolutionary processes already? In this hypothetical situation in your article, it seems like such an organism would have a pretty major advantage, at least early on. Are there any known reasons why this hasn't happened before?
1. Yeah, I also don't think this is an infohazard (or at least not a bad one), but I took it down anyway on the advice of 2 biosecurity experts I trusted (and who later changed their minds).
2. There's no plausible path for normal life to mutate into mirror life because the intermediate stages (partly normal, partly mirror) aren't viable. The technical report discusses this in more detail.
I suspect that being a bioinfohazard wasn't the real reason the author took it down. 2021-2022 was the crescendo period for the covid origins debate, so author probably sensed / was being told that posing doomsday scenarios involving synthetic biology would be unhelpful to the then-dominant scientists-can-do-no-wrong narrative.
Yes, once bootstrapped properly, this would work. Cyanobacteria can use just H2O, CO2 and sunlight to metabolically synthesize all biomolecules. While marine organisms will still eat the algae (and be at selective penalty due to deriving extremely limited amounts of energy from doing so) the lack of gene-and-cell level parasites will invariably lead to the outcome you describe.
Could be made into Ice-9 level biohazard if algae is programmed to secrete a non-chirality-dependent eukaryotic-targeting toxin into the environment.
Thank you, and glad to see this reposted, this is a very interesting article.
I've been trying to learn more about biosecurity and especially about how biosecurity professionals model and think about the world. Out of curiosity, why was this article considered an infohazard? It seems to me that this would be quite the advanced feat of bioengineering and that anyone with the means and knowledge to accomplish it would also already know that it is a possibility. It also seems to have limited utility as a bioweapon, beyond being a literal doomsday weapon. This does not seem to be something that current well-known, active terrorist organizations would be massively interested in, as their goals generally do not involve destroying the world.
Another unrelated question- why hasn't a "mirror organism" been produced through natural evolutionary processes already? In this hypothetical situation in your article, it seems like such an organism would have a pretty major advantage, at least early on. Are there any known reasons why this hasn't happened before?
1. Yeah, I also don't think this is an infohazard (or at least not a bad one), but I took it down anyway on the advice of 2 biosecurity experts I trusted (and who later changed their minds).
2. There's no plausible path for normal life to mutate into mirror life because the intermediate stages (partly normal, partly mirror) aren't viable. The technical report discusses this in more detail.
I appreciate the reply, thank you. Somehow I completely missed the articles you linked in the first paragraph, I'll give those a read.
I suspect that being a bioinfohazard wasn't the real reason the author took it down. 2021-2022 was the crescendo period for the covid origins debate, so author probably sensed / was being told that posing doomsday scenarios involving synthetic biology would be unhelpful to the then-dominant scientists-can-do-no-wrong narrative.
>I suspect that being a bioinfohazard wasn't the real reason the author took it down.
Nope, I was specifically asked to take it down by 2 biosecurity experts on infohazard grounds.
Reminds me of the Rifters trilogy by Peter Watts.
Yes! Starfish is a great book (and partly inspired this post)
Yes, once bootstrapped properly, this would work. Cyanobacteria can use just H2O, CO2 and sunlight to metabolically synthesize all biomolecules. While marine organisms will still eat the algae (and be at selective penalty due to deriving extremely limited amounts of energy from doing so) the lack of gene-and-cell level parasites will invariably lead to the outcome you describe.
Could be made into Ice-9 level biohazard if algae is programmed to secrete a non-chirality-dependent eukaryotic-targeting toxin into the environment.
[Filed in my mental infohazard box.]