Creating Mirror Life could cause a complete Extinction event

[Scholar]

 

This is a very interesting idea. It basically boils down to all life on earth being biased towards a certain asymmetrical molecular structure given that life began biased towards one asymmetry over another.

Life does not ever counter the counter-symmetry to this structure, because all life is based on DNA which is carries in it that structural bias.

If you create a precisely mirrored version of DNA and a life form, like a bacteria (on a molecular level), it would be impossible for any organism on this planet to detect and counter-measure against that type of life. No immune system could even detect, let alone fight such biological forms.

 

The reason why this is such an essential idea is that it demonstrated an asymmetry of power as a result of unconscious evolutionary processed. Meaning, because of how exceptionally unlikely it is for a life form to just emerge from the ground up (from the creation of a new form of DNA that would happen to be a mirror version of ours), life basically never encountered these threats at all, during the entire history of evolution. This means there are absolutely no adaptations to such threats.

Which means that given such a threat is introduced, it would virtually an infinite power glitch in regards to evolution in relation to it's competitors. It's basically a blatant security vulnerability that is present in virtually all life on earth.

 

 

The reason why it is an symmetry of power is because, it might be far easier to create such mirror life than to find defenses against it. It might become fairly trivial to create such life forms in the near future, especially given advancements in AI, but it might not be even remotely as trivial to find ways of counteracting the negative effects of being exposed to such life.

 

This is basically an inevitability of technological evolution. The inevitablity is that, as civilization grows more powerful, each mistake it will make will also become more devastating. With nuclear weapons this is clear, but in relation to what awaits is in the future, such weaponry might be viewed as trivial.

As technology evolves, each individual actor within civilization will also be given more power and therefore more responsibility. At some point this power might become so great that even a single individual within civilization could cause a world ending event, simply because it might not be possible to contain something like the distribution of AI systems which could make it easy for individuals to create technologies that are life ending.

 

There is no reason for why life couldn't just be wiped out and be forced to start from scratch. Life is iterative, so it will just begin anew, and maybe the next intelligent life form will go down a pathway that does not lead to extinction. Maybe that takes a million planets that all develop intelligent life, and out of 1 of all of them, intelligent life gets to persist.

If you think this is outragous, then you simply have to consider what the process of evolution is in the first place. The vast majority of species that existed went extinct. Evolution in that way does not care about wastefulness, or your particular feelings about the world. To evolution, the entire universe, or multiverse, is it's playground.

[Nilsi]

Very interesting.

Freud described the Doppelgänger, the perfect double, as the quintessential uncanny experience - likely because, as you noted, a perfect double doesn't occur in nature. Its absence makes it profoundly unsettling, and apparently, with good reason.

Edited January 5 by Nilsi

[Ishanga]

2 hours ago, Scholar said:

 

This is a very interesting idea. It basically boils down to all life on earth being biased towards a certain asymmetrical molecular structure given that life began biased towards one asymmetry over another.

Life does not ever counter the counter-symmetry to this structure, because all life is based on DNA which is carries in it that structural bias.

If you create a precisely mirrored version of DNA and a life form, like a bacteria (on a molecular level), it would be impossible for any organism on this planet to detect and counter-measure against that type of life. No immune system could even detect, let alone fight such biological forms.

 

The reason why this is such an essential idea is that it demonstrated an asymmetry of power as a result of unconscious evolutionary processed. Meaning, because of how exceptionally unlikely it is for a life form to just emerge from the ground up (from the creation of a new form of DNA that would happen to be a mirror version of ours), life basically never encountered these threats at all, during the entire history of evolution. This means there are absolutely no adaptations to such threats.

Which means that given such a threat is introduced, it would virtually an infinite power glitch in regards to evolution in relation to it's competitors. It's basically a blatant security vulnerability that is present in virtually all life on earth.

 

 

The reason why it is an symmetry of power is because, it might be far easier to create such mirror life than to find defenses against it. It might become fairly trivial to create such life forms in the near future, especially given advancements in AI, but it might not be even remotely as trivial to find ways of counteracting the negative effects of being exposed to such life.

 

This is basically an inevitability of technological evolution. The inevitablity is that, as civilization grows more powerful, each mistake it will make will also become more devastating. With nuclear weapons this is clear, but in relation to what awaits is in the future, such weaponry might be viewed as trivial.

As technology evolves, each individual actor within civilization will also be given more power and therefore more responsibility. At some point this power might become so great that even a single individual within civilization could cause a world ending event, simply because it might not be possible to contain something like the distribution of AI systems which could make it easy for individuals to create technologies that are life ending.

 

There is no reason for why life couldn't just be wiped out and be forced to start from scratch. Life is iterative, so it will just begin anew, and maybe the next intelligent life form will go down a pathway that does not lead to extinction. Maybe that takes a million planets that all develop intelligent life, and out of 1 of all of them, intelligent life gets to persist.

If you think this is outragous, then you simply have to consider what the process of evolution is in the first place. The vast majority of species that existed went extinct. Evolution in that way does not care about wastefulness, or your particular feelings about the world. To evolution, the entire universe, or multiverse, is it's playground.

Unless we raise Human Consciousness at scale levels we will have access to many many ways to destroy ourselves individually as we do now, and collectively as we almost do now, but as You said someday a single individual may have the power to destroy all life, and if their as unconscious as the majority of ppl are today then this will happen..So the most important action now is to raise Human Consciousness to a high enough point where we at the least have a chance to survive, its 50/50 in my POV that this will happen...

[Lews Therin]

i was waiting for him to adress the question that it seems logical that if we can't perceive nor eat it, it can't perceive nor it us, the video didn't talk about this.

I went to the comments and somebody pointed it out.

Not to say there are no risks, but apparently that isn't nearly as dangerous as the guy makes it seem, it won't be capable of devouring us from the inside or anything like that, it will have to find a way to build it's nutrients from inorganic matter, which is more complicated than what most simple bacteria do.

We will probably still find means of having a single person be able to wipe out all life, but apparently not so fast.

[Scholar]

3 hours ago, Lews Therin said:

i was waiting for him to adress the question that it seems logical that if we can't perceive nor eat it, it can't perceive nor it us, the video didn't talk about this.

I went to the comments and somebody pointed it out.

Not to say there are no risks, but apparently that isn't nearly as dangerous as the guy makes it seem, it won't be capable of devouring us from the inside or anything like that, it will have to find a way to build it's nutrients from inorganic matter, which is more complicated than what most simple bacteria do.

We will probably still find means of having a single person be able to wipe out all life, but apparently not so fast.

Yes, there are a few limitation to Mirror Life, in that they would have difficulty competing in an environment in which most molecules or protein structures would have to be reorganized to fit their handedness.

 

The concept itself is interesting however, given advancements in evolutionary technologies such as machine learning, we might reach a critical point at which technology itself might become far more accessible than it currently is. The scary thing about this is that it is no longer engineering that leads to technological advancement, but evolution itself. Evolution is capable of generating complexity, rather than mere complicatedness, such as engineering is reducable to.

Complexity arrived through evolution can solve for problems beyond the feasibility of linear thinking. Solutions might not be comprehendible, given that the complexity itself is the solution/function, in an irreducible way.