[xolox]

The potential for unchecked "growth" and potentially fatal infection vaguely reminds me of the terrifying aspects of prion based diseases. Thanks for giving me another theoretical nightmare scenario to worry about in the back of my mind! :-)

Related:

Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks (stanford.edu)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42403394

[gus_massa]

Prions are real. Don't eat mad cow. Rememeber that boiling prions would not kill them, but burning them to ashes will.

Mirrored bacterias are still just scifi. It's too hard to make one of them for now and some normal bacterias will eat them anyway becuase there are a lot of weird bacterias that can eat some specific varity of crap. One of them will save us [1].

The normal bacterias can have trouble eating the reversed proteins, RNA, DNA and even sugars. But oil/fat don't have this problem! In the worst case, normal bacterias will just steal all the oil and fat from the reversed bacterais and kill them, and we will have to sweep the discarded reversed proteins and burn them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds

[nytesky]

Grey goo.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo

AI paperclips

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/ai-and-paperclip-problem

Prions getting into food supply

Nuclear holocaust.

I’m definitely not sleeping tonight. I can see why Gen Z is thinking not to have kids…

[Terr_]

I find it slightly heartening to consider that all biological life is already a long-running Gray Goo apocalypse, and one of the inheritors of that legacy are towering trillion-unit megastructures with eldritch hiveminds were call "people."

[ThrowawayTestr]

Environmental collapse due to climate change is way, way more likely than any of those.