Tag Archives: doomsday clock

mirror life

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The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved their Doomsday Clock closer to midnight. The clock itself, like a lot of aggregate indices (I’m talking to you ASCE infrastructure report card) is more or less a gimmick to get public and media attention, in the hopes that at least some influential people will dig into the underlying analysis and data. Their underlying analysis includes all the things you would expect: nuclear arms control lapses and reversals, direct and indirect military conflict between nuclear-armed powers, apathy and intentional reversal on addressing climate change, biological and AI weapons of mass destruction (including AI-developed biological weapons of mass destruction, which is a particularly chilling thought), and the rise of “nationalistic autocracy”, which makes all of these conflicts more likely and any cooperation to solve international problems less likely.

Completely new to me was the idea of “mirror life”. This sounds like a kind of biological gray goo, and I wonder how it could have snuck up on me unawares?

In December 2024, scientists from nine countries announced the recognition of a potentially existential threat to all life on Earth: the laboratory synthesis of so-called “mirror life.” Those scientists urged that mirror bacteria and other mirror cells—composed of chemically-synthesized molecules that are mirror-images of those found on Earth, much as a left hand mirrors a right hand—not be created, because a self-replicating mirror cell could plausibly evade normal controls on growth, spread throughout all ecosystems, and eventually cause the widespread death of humans, other animals, and plants, potentially disrupting all life on Earth. So far, however, the international community has not arrived at a plan to address this risk.

Here is Eric Drexler’s original concept of gray goo from Engines of Creation (easily on my must read list), via Wikipedia:

Early assembler-based replicators could beat the most advanced modern organisms. ‘Plants’ with ‘leaves’ no more efficient than today’s solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough, omnivorous ‘bacteria’ could out-compete real bacteria: they could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop — at least if we made no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.

this year’s doomsday clock

The good news is the clock has not been moved any closer to midnight. The bad news there are only two minutes to go, which is as close as they put it at any point during the cold war. The reasons they give are climate change and, yes, good old nuclear weapons.

In the nuclear realm, the United States abandoned the Iran nuclear deal and announced it would withdraw from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), grave steps towards a complete dismantlement of the global arms control process. Although the United States and North Korea moved away from the bellicose rhetoric of 2017, the urgent North Korean nuclear dilemma remains unresolved. Meanwhile, the world’s nuclear nations proceeded with programs of “nuclear modernization” that are all but indistinguishable from a worldwide arms race, and the military doctrines of Russia and the United States have increasingly eroded the long-held taboo against the use of nuclear weapons.