Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
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John Quiggin 
Move over AI as latest existential threat. There is now mirror life. Mirror life or mirror-image life is a hypothetical form of life using “mirror-reflected” or “mirror-chiral” molecular building blocks. Mirror-chiral molecular building blocks are mirror-reverse structured versions of natural biological molecules. Like left and right hands, the mirror-chirals cannot be perfectly stacked with each other.
Just as a left hand cannot go into a right glove and vice versa, a left-chiral molecule cannot react successfully with a right-chiral molecule, meaning it cannot “key-in” successfully. This is a critical obstacle against the binding and reactions of left-handed and right-handed organic and biological molecules.
Natural life only uses specific classes of shapes. It uses left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars for example. Proteins are left-handed but interestingly DNA is right handed because of the right-handed spiral helix. Scientists could theoretically build synthetic mirror life using mirror-chiral parts.
Firstly, there is a way that mirror life absolutely cannot be internally dangerous but there is also one serious exception that I mention at the end of this post. Neither a living mirror bacterium nor a mirror virus can directly pose a “classic” infectious danger to natural humans, animals, or plants. Mirror viruses would simply disintegrate in the environment without ever finding a compatible cell to infect. Mirror bacteria could also never infect a living host in the “classical” way.
“Mirror bacteria bannot “eat” or “attack” us.
Ttheir biochemical “weapons” and “keys” would be the wrong shape to process normal life.
Inability to digest: A mirror bacterium cannot directly consume a normal plant or animal. Its mirror enzymes are shaped to break down right-handed sugars and left-handed amino acids. Normal biomass consists of left-handed sugars and right-handed amino acids, making us completely indigestible to them.
Failure to infect: Mirror bacteria cannot act as traditional pathogens. They lack the correctly shaped surface proteins (“keys”) to bind to normal cellular receptors (“locks”) to invade or harm host cells. Incompatible toxins: Any toxic proteins or enzymes secreted by mirror bacteria would fail to recognize or bind to normal biological targets, rendering them largely non-toxic to our cells.” – Google AI.
But the word “largely” above could be doing a lot of work.
“The Real Danger: Indirect Ecological Competition.
While mirror bacteria cannot directly attack us, they pose an existential threat through resource starvation rather than infection
Consuming elemental resources: Bacteria do not just eat organic biomass; they rely heavily on achiral (non-handed) nutrients. Mirror bacteria can freely consume elemental phosphate, nitrates, ammonium, oxygen, and carbon dioxide.
Starving the food chain: By rapidly consuming these foundational elements, mirror bacteria would starve the base of the natural food chain (like phytoplankton and soil microbes), leading to widespread ecosystem collapse.
Unstoppable growth: Because normal predators (like amoebas, white blood cells, and natural bacteriophages) have “wrong-handed” enzymes, they cannot digest or destroy the mirror bacteria, allowing the synthetic invaders to multiply completely unchecked.” – Google AI.
One final danger does occur to me re “infection” or rather internal competition in natural life. A mirror bacteria might inhabit the gut and change the gut biome, most likely for the worse and perhaps even catastrophically, if it were a bacteria that could live in that environment and only consumed achiral (non-handed) nutrients.
In that case, it would be invisible to the immune system, invisible to the healthy microbiome and it could starve the good gut biome bacteria and the host.
“This exact potential for catastrophic, untreatable internal colonization is why researchers recently placed mirror life on the Doomsday Clock tracking list as a major existential threat.” – Google AI.
Of course, a real biologist would have to check everything I and the AI have written. But the Doomsday clock tracking list addition demonstrates how worried scientists are.
[…] Source: johnquiggin.com […]
Correction: I got my left and right mixed up at one point… or the AI did, not sure. Nah, it was probably me re-editing something. I write 30 words and quote 30 more and I already need another editor to check my “work”.
It should have been:
“A mirror bacterium cannot directly consume a normal plant or animal. Its mirror enzymes are shaped to break down left-handed sugars and right-handed amino acids. Normal biomass consists of right-handed sugars and left-handed amino acids, making us completely indigestible to them.”
I plead equivalence with “the power of 10 mistake”. If an economist can make a power of 10 mistake, I can make a left / right mistake.
For once, a real PV breakthrough.
A 51% increase in generated output. A calculated 73% increase in the economic value of the output from the flatter hourly generating profile. This is not a simulation or a lab result, but credible results from six months of a 25 Kw field trial at a coastal water treatment plant in the Basque country, exposed to high winds and salt spray. The claim is made by a spinoff from the Spanish government research agency CSIC, cooperating with the local water company CABB.
The other reason for believing this is the Sybil Fawlty (“special subject: the bleeding obvious”) simplicity of the innovation: bolting angled reflectors to the feet of commonplace vertically mounted bifacial solar panels (you probably can’t use a house roof, it has to be a field) . It’s so simple that the idea may well not be patentable, only the special treatment of the reflectors. I would not be shocked if the developers and the Spanish government make a pile of money.
Article here: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/07/15/pilot-tests-show-vertical-pv-system-with-specular-reflectors-delivers-50-higher-yield/ Better image on the company website: https://futurevoltaics.com/es/ The only thing they got wrong is the instantly forgettable name. I suggest Alhazen – look him up.
The transition just got a whole lot cheaper and faster,
PS. The announcement is clear that the increases are relative to a small baseline installation at the same site using fixed-tilt ground mounts. These are used commercially in many places. However, if you are prepared to pay for a higher yield, there is a standard alternative using single-axis trackers, turning the panels in the course of the day using cables or actuators. These raise output by between 15% and 30%. If you take trackers as the baseline, the gain from the reflector system is cut roughly in half. It is still large. I have no idea of the relative costs, but trackers have moving parts to go wrong and need more maintenance.
Woot!!!!
The theory of sourdough
I had a go, I’m not entirely sure why, at baking my own bread. You will find my tips and recipe in this download: http://www.jameswimberley.es/Notes/Breadnotes,pdf What has this got to do with John Quiggin’s blog? Honestly, not much. To justify the advert, I thought I would throw in some speculation about wider issues of biological and economic systems.
The starting-point is this observation: “The setup goes back to the neolithic agricultural revolution that introduced humans to beer and bread. If you like, it’s a three-way commensal orgy of yeast, lactobacilli and homo sapiens, and the main way we have stayed alive since the great discovery.”
This does not exhaust the pattern of mutual dependency in the bread system. The fermentation trio links up with commensalities or social contracts in several directions. First, wheat and peasants. Wheat gets an enormously expanded acreage – 200 million hectares – , secured by human labour in tillage, seed distribution, and suppression of competitors and pests. The price wheat pays is genetic modifications that make it completely dependent on these services – the evolutionary history is obscure and controversial. The labour requirements and high productivity of wheat cultivation enabled a massive growth in human numbers, and the mutation of the limited status hierarchies of primate bands into rigid extractive castes, kingdoms, priesthoods, codified laws and war-fighting armies.
Fermentation of grain with yeast produces alcohol. This does not stay in bread but can be easily captured from a mash of grain with warm water, making beer. So began the human adventure with addictive mind-altering or mind-numbing drugs. Alcohol is the true opium of the people.
Agriculture created opportunities for mice and rats, which found grain stores attractive year-round targets. They created an opening for expert rodent hunters in the form of cats, which hunter-gatherers had not prevously domesticated during millennia of cooperation with hunting dogs. The cats have since renegotiated the deal to their advantage, swapping mousing duties for psychological manipulation. The textbook example is Larry the reigning resident cat at 10 Downing Street, who has outlasted six Prime Ministers. His policy on mice, in line with Chamberlain and Starmer, is pure appeasement. He carefully cultivates the press and secretaries, sound insurance against the U-turns of his nominal political masters. https://www.museumofpm.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Larry-the-Cat-Alamy-2XN057P.jpg
Wheat farming also requires fertile soil and water, in an altered carbon cycle, enmeshed in today’s climate crisis. Grain storage led to pottery, and so on.
How can we think rigorously about this web of dependencies? Part of it can be studied by economics. We can for instance draw up a Leontief matrix of technical dependencies at whatever resolution is useful. The production functions in the cells can in principle be enriched from fixed coefficients to nonlinear economies of scale and learning. We can add rows for inputs of capital. labour, land and energy. In all of these, we stay within the the market economy, and are guided by the guiding focus of the discipline on the efficient allocation of scarce resources. This does not work well for unpriced environmental externalities, even less for yes/no biological questions of sustainability and diversity. If we start from these as objectives, economic analysis appears as a threat, eroding management principles that should be unquestionable through idolatry of the market.
We do need both perspectives. Mutual respect between them is more attainable than a grand synthesis. There is one idea that may partly reconcile economics and biology: equilibrium. The Holocene before homo sapiens, but with hominids, can be taken as a baseline biological equilibrium. Early human hunter-gatherers began to disturb this through extermination of megafauna outside Africa, but the big changes came with the neolithic agricultural and domestication revolutions about 10,000 years ago. Up to the start of the coal-driven industrial revolution in the 18th century, the economy stayed more or less in a fairly robust partial equilibrium with nature, with sustainable farming, fishing, and forestry, low-energy lifestyles and limited (but very unhealthy) urbanization. The trajectory since 1750 has radically transformed this picture. The advanced post-industrial economy we have now has veered off course. It has become completely unsustainable and is about to hit the buffers, hard.
Okay, this is probably all true. At the same time though, if there is sugar floating out in the universe, maybe this was all meant to be somehow. We were probably always going to eat the apple.
I am still hoping we can squeeze by somehow. Extricate ourselves. I agree it is going to get gnarly. How bad will it be though? Or do I not want to know? I am already not doing enough, with what I know now. To Do list: get a job, make lots of money, buy panels and a battery …
Also, bread is delicious. Does guilt make things taste better?
Just fyi, sorry to be a pain, but I got an error message:
“ERROR 404: ARCHIVO NO ENCONTRADO
El documento solicitado no ha sido encontrado.”
I do adore sourdough. It’s supposed to be easier to digest, too.
Yum.