We’re all inured to sensationalist headlines about some disaster or another on the horizon. So I don’t blame anyone who was exhausted when they saw last month that dozens of scientists were warning in the journal Science that mirror bacteria could bring about a catastrophic ecosystem collapse and even mass extinction.
After all, we already have looming threats like H5N1 to worry about, and more generally we live in an age that, as Adam Kirsch put it recently in The Atlantic, feels like “apocalypse, constantly.” The mirror bacteria news hit the same week we were told that a widely read study about how our black spatulas were killing us was really just the result of a math error. It can be hard to tell which concerns are deathly serious and which are just headlines that will be forgotten a month later.
But having done a lot more reading about the mirror bacteria situation, I’m here with bad news: It’s real, and it’s really serious.
More than 35 scientists, including leading researchers across half a dozen different fields, came together in a December technical report to argue that ongoing work on mirror bacteria could trigger a mass extinction. The catastrophe it warns about is plausible, if mind-bending.
And it’s not one of those situations where the skeptics are coming from outside the field: Many of the leading scientists who worked to invent mirror life have now become convinced such work would be incredibly dangerous. In fact it’s one of the rare cases where experts have become more concerned as they’ve learned more, instead of less so.
But there’s also good news: Now that we are aware of the risk, catastrophe shouldn’t happen by accident. At this point, mirror life is mostly theoretical — it would take decades of work to actually create it. So as scientists come to look more closely at the risks, they can bring about a stop to this work, with very little cost to other essential research.