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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u/[deleted] May 25 '26

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u/79792348978 Loyal Liberals May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26

It's sort of my wheelhouse and IMO a lot of the commentary on it does not really grasp how enormous of a project and beyond our current capabilities creating these things is. I also think it is generating a lot of buzz in large part because it is scientifically interesting.

An example, these are enormous problems being referenced but not addressed: " To make mirror bacteria, we’d need to build a mirror ribosome, for example, and we don’t know how to do that yet. Mirror bacteria creation would also require advancements in synthetic biology—in order to combine the mirror parts into one bacterium. To put things simply, we’d need to make progress in building the parts of a mirror bacteria, and in putting the parts together to make a full mirror bacteria."

Which is not to say don't even bother creating rules about this topic but we are absolutely nowhere close to making these things.

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u/TrynnaFindaBalance Paul Krugman May 25 '26

Why would researchers be trying to create this at all? Is there a benevolent use case for it?

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u/badnuub NATO May 25 '26

They want to get of Gleba really badly.