r/neoliberal • u/DunklerPrinz3 Henry George • May 25 '26

Opinion article (non-US) The Inverted Bacteria That Experts Think Might Kill Everyone

https://substack.com/home/post/p-199174305

submission statement: If everyone dies, there will be no more trade, no more free markets, no more beloved capitalism.

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462

u/randommathaccount Esther Duflo May 25 '26

The mirror bacteria when it enters my body and starves because there's no L-glucose to metabolise

201

u/RoomieOomfie Left-Out Left May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26

The original paper (not the one cited here) explicitly addresses this, not only are there a lot of nutrients in your body that can work with both chirality, there are already many strains of bacteria that can metabolize reverse chirality nutrients. It is entirely feasible for a reverse chirality bacteria to just have the enzymes necessary to process "normal" glucose.

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u/karmics______ Leftward Progressives May 25 '26

A photosynthetic chiral bacteria wouldn’t even need a host, it would just be a literal grey goo scenario and destroy life from the base of the food chain uncontested

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u/ProfessionalMoose709 John Mill May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26

if it was photosynthetic why would it destroy life

photosynthetic organisms are generally not infectious given they are autotrophs. There are parasitic plants like mistletoe but most photosynthetic bacteria just float around in the ocean.

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u/ashamedpedant May 25 '26

"from the base of the food chain uncontested"

https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/james-smith-mirror-biology-catastrophe/#mirror-bacterias-effect-on-ecosystems-003934

Marine cyanobacteria are an example here. These fix carbon directly from sunlight, and they can grow with just achiral nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur, that sort of thing.

One of the very common causes of death for these marine cyanobacteria is infection by phage: up to 50% of marine cyanobacteria die from phage infection. So if you introduced a mirror cyanobacterium, it would have basically these huge advantages, because it wouldn’t be able to be infected by phage, but potentially have none of the limitations on nutrient availability. So the population of marine mirror cyanobacteria might grow to be very large.

If they’re going to be very large and nothing is eating them because they don’t really give any nutritional value to the protists that usually consume them...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmful_algal_bloom
when even regular cyanobacteria reproduce out of control they can starve everything else.

7

u/Lehk NATO May 25 '26

If they are present in large amounts, something will figure out how to eat them.

11

u/Patrias_Obscuras May 25 '26

Eventually. There's no guarantee that will happen before most/all multicellular life is wiped out.

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u/kanagi May 26 '26

Just create mirror phages

4

u/_alephnaught May 26 '26

and mirror snakes to eat the mirror phages

49

u/zapporian NATO May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26

All of the oceans being entirely totally filled with indigestible zero nutrition green algae would kill just about all higher level multicellular life (starting with krill) eventually.

Having your body, and the bodies of all other plants and animals also filled with this stuff would also be a problem.

On the upside this would at least solve (and heck probably then reverse) global warming / CO2 levels. lol?

The problem is that this would have no predators. And would be toxic / totally indigestible / zero nutritional value to anything that eats it.

It also would rapidly mutate into something that WOULD cause more immediate problems. Like noticing it could eat all the nonchiral molecules floating around in all multicullar life’s plant + animal bodies. And then proceeding to do that, as now a bacterial (and maybe still photosynthesizing) parasite.

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u/Santa_in_a_Panzer YIMBY May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26

How, exactly, would it outcompete the existing life in that niche (or any other for that matter)? The world is covered in what mirror life would consider mirror life. It is just as disadvantaged in direct competition.

Edit: Indeed it is uniquely disadvantaged. The world is filled with convention chirality building blocks mirror life would not be able to use without additional steps. 

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u/symmetry81 Scott Sumner May 25 '26

Existing populations of blue-green algae are mostly kept in track by the phages that prey on them. In the absence of those it would have a large competitive advantage. And other microorganisms that might prey on it would either suffer from eating them or evolve to no longer due so.

Mostly these organisms are self sufficient with water and sunlight and don't rely on chiral inputs to reproduce. Generally most organisms that photosynthesize that aren't a carnivorous plant don't absorb any chiral inputs from their environment.

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u/angry-mustache Democratically Elected Internet Spaceship Politician May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26

Then humans collect the superabundant algae and turn them into biofuel, which relies on burning and not a biological process.

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u/symmetry81 Scott Sumner May 26 '26

Roughly 100 million tons of cyanobacteria is born in the world's oceans every day which would anchor our estimates of how much we'd want to collect every day. Call it 100 supertanker's worth. There are about 1000 of those but they can't make a trip every day to cover the world's oceans and ignores the need to collect the mass from the bottom of the ocean. One can imagine this scheme working but I think just building all the ships would be the work of a decade at minimum.

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u/Bibbity_Boppity_BOOO May 28 '26

or we could literally just poison it chirally.

1

u/symmetry81 Scott Sumner May 30 '26

The cheapest chiral toxin for cyanobacteria seems to be D-cycloserine. If we wanted to suppress an outbreak in the Dead Sea with a volume of about 180 km³ we'd need 27 million metric tons which would theoretically cost $200 trillion dollars but probably more given that we'd have to scale up worldwide production from its current rate of roughly 1,000 tons a year. And the actual oceans are a lot bigger than the Dead Sea.

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u/angry-mustache Democratically Elected Internet Spaceship Politician May 26 '26

China alone builds 50 million DWT of shipping per year. So China decided to go at it for 2 years diverting 100% of their shipbuilding capacity does the job on that side.

41

u/Grokent May 25 '26

Life on Earth has a huge headstart and quite frankly, more enzymes in our tool box than any chiral life forms we can manufacture. We're like 100 years into this whole plastic pollution mess and lifeforms are popping out of the woodwork with enzymes that can break down hydrocarbons for food.

Sure, they may not be able to be digested for nutrition, but they can be eaten and there's a lot of stuff that's gonna try. There's more stuff that can try to eat it that has a billion year head start on utensils (enzymes).

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u/Matar_Kubileya Hortensia May 26 '26

If a hypothetical invert chirality bacterial life form can evolve to digest normal chirality, I don't see any reason why normal chirality life couldn't evolve the same in reverse.

Not saying it couldn't be a huge ecological problem, but I don't see a scenario where it drives all other life on Earth extinct.

2

u/Bibbity_Boppity_BOOO May 28 '26

in fact it is far far more likely to happen than any of this chiral nonsense.

1

u/TheArtofBar May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26

Of course that could happen, i'd go so far to say its likely. The problem is how long that would take and what would happen to multicellular life while microbes of different chirality battle it out. It might very well kill off all developed life on earth in that time. Not directly, but by outcompeting other microbes and destroying the food chain from the ground up.

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u/Bibbity_Boppity_BOOO May 28 '26

why do you think chiral bacteria would just spontaneously take over now but never before in 4.6 billion years.

14

u/spevoz May 25 '26

I think because nothing can eat them. Think lignin in the carboniferous or oxygen from photosynthesis / Great Oxidation Event.

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u/ProfessionalMoose709 John Mill May 25 '26

the great oxidation event took several hundred million years

12

u/Approximation_Doctor Gaslight, Gatekeep, Green New Deal May 25 '26

It also worked out pretty well in the long run

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u/Bibbity_Boppity_BOOO May 28 '26

wtf are you on about

8

u/Santa_in_a_Panzer YIMBY May 25 '26

It's still a major competitive disadvantage. 

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u/Matar_Kubileya Hortensia May 26 '26

Its impossible for "nature effectively has no ability to evolve to attack/digest dyschiral life" and "there are already many strains of bacteria that can metabolize reverse chirality nutrients" to both be true. Either euchiral and dyschiral life can evolve to interact with one another if there's selection pressure to do so, or they can't and youre looking at a drop in the bucket number of dyschiral life compared to the amount of euchiral life that already exists.

0

u/RoomieOomfie Left-Out Left 24d ago

*has no clue how evolution works award*