A few things we mentioned in this podcast:

- Mirror life https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/17/science/mirror-cell-life-dangers

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Hello and welcome to the Cognitive

Engineering podcast, brought to you by Aleph Insights and

produced by me, Fraser McGruer. I'm here with Nick Hare, Chris

Wragg and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. On this podcast, we

look at a wide range of topics, and today we are discussing the

dangers of Mirror Life.

Chris, what on earth is mirror life? I have no idea what we're

talking about.

Yeah, this isn't some reference to sort of the,

you know, narcissism of modern culture or something. This is

actually a whole sort of discipline of science, which

involves mirror organisms, such as mirror bacteria that are

constructed from mirror images of molecules that are found in

nature. So if you take our DNA and all the DNA you know on

Earth, it is all what is called right handed so it's helix

spirals in a clockwise direction. And and then, you

know, proteins are all that's because righty tighty lefty

loose. Righty tighty lefty loose. Right handed means it's,

if you're going up a staircase, right, a spiral staircase, and

you would use your right hand on the inner Bannister, you're

going in that direction, right? I think, I think the

sprinkle a bit more technical jargon. Yeah,

certain molecules have isomorphism, which means that

you can have it looking one way, or you can get a mirror image of

that,

an enantiomorph, if we're trying to use Yes,

exactly, yeah, an opposite chiral

molecules don't so simple sugars are just

symmetrical in whatever way you look at them. Boring, yeah. Then

some molecules, such as the the protein, the molecules of

makeup, proteins and some sugars, some alcohols, etc, are

handed they you can have one version or a mirror image of

that version, and they can naturally, they can actually

occur.

But isn't it true that orange, the taste of

orange, is actually caused by a molecule that is the mirror

image of the one that causes the taste of

lemon, something like that? Yeah. But it turns

out that all life on planet Earth has, for some reason, sort

of sent that gone towards one handedness. What is always right

handed.

The implications

of this being, before you go on, if you can

tuck a little bit further on under or will it not go down

further? No, or There you go. I've got so many, okay, I've got

so many questions, but keep going. Chris, yeah.

I mean the key, the key thing, really, never mind

why this occurs. The fact is, it's, it's a phenomenon in

nature, and it applies to all organisms. And the key issue is

that human scientists have been experimenting with the creation

of mirror images of naturally occurring molecules, and in some

cases, starting to consider how you might create a mirror image

bacteria right for various issues. Now what this means is,

right. So there are, you know, some benefits around, you know,

treatment of disease, being able to produce chemicals at scale

and so on. But the potential massive downside to this is that

you create bacteria for which our immune system has no ability

to recognise or contain. You know, if you think about like a

phone charger, you know, our our immune cells are a little bit

like, you know, a phone charger that you're trying to plug into

the to the bacteria, and if you've got the wrong phone

charger, you're a bit buggered. And so we're potentially the

issue is we're potentially creating super bugs, I suppose

that that all organisms have no natural defence against and so

the scientific community itself has, has sort of been

increasingly realising this is probably something it shouldn't

do. And so there was a there was a large sort of paper and a

commentary on it in the Journal of Science last year where

hundreds of scientists came together, you know, Nobel Prize

winning scientists, and they said, Unless compelling evidence

emerges that mirror life would not pose extraordinary dangers,

we believe that mirror bacteria and other mirror organisms, even

those with engineered bio containment measures, should not

be created so effectively trying to Create a moratorium on this

element of science, because they feel it could pose an absolutely

catastrophic risk too.

Okay, look, a couple of things. First of all,

we've done a lot of podcasts together, and I'm often felt

confused during these things, right? I have no idea what we're

talking about.

Don't think. It matters, good. I don't think it

matters because I think we're going to treat it as the

biochemistry existential risk equivalent of AI takeover. Fine.

Think that's okay, good. And also, lots of

these words I've never heard of before, and sometimes when stuff

gets explained to you, you understand it more, but

sometimes you understand it less. We've made you stupider.

Yeah, who knew, right, that this?

Yeah, tell intelligence without words.

Yeah. I can't

help but feel this is my problem. But the

fundamental question behind it, and also, why are we discussing

this, right? Okay, so essentially, what we're what

we're looking at, is whether or not our demise as a species is

going to be brought about by stuff we do, or some other, some

other means. Are we our own worst enemy?

Okay, gotcha? Sounds good? Well, that's a

nice, nice, happy topic. Who's right answer? Are we the are we?

What was the what was the what was the question? Again, the

simple question, Are we our own worst enemy? Okay, who's gonna

take this So, Peter, are we? Are you your own worst enemy? Are

you

Fraser's worst enemy? Yeah, yes, yeah,

definitely. Fraser never, plenty of those. I'm gonna phrase it as

the the Promethean problem. So, you know, we we there's a

paradox of progress in everything that drives our

progress, in in cultural progress, technology progress,

quality of life. Everything is kind of driven by our own

creativity, our ambition, our curiosity, and our sort of

ability to solve problems. But those things, those drivers

ambition, curiosity, problem solving and creativity are

indifferent, inherently indifferent, to moral progress.

You know, we the moral consequence. You know, the moral

consequence is the thing you bolt on kind of afterwards. We

tend to create first and then understand later. So we, we, we

build the bomb, we build an atomic bomb, and then we go, ah,

actually, this kind of changes the whole power dynamic of the

world. Let's, let's, let's now have some accords and some

treaties to try to put a lid on this and and have a whole dog,

dog more about mutual escort, sure destruction, which means

that we won't, we won't use them. So it's sort of we, we

have a tendency, as as a species, to to to open Pandora's

Box, to bring in another clumsy, there's a lot of classical

illusions clumsily bring in another class

for me, yes, opening a Pandora's box after the horse

is bowled.

So the credit the question narcissist earlier,

yeah, we're back up to date. We are. So the question is, are we

Prometheus, you know, getting fire, or are we the fire? That's

the uncontrolled fire spread from a spark like it. Do we have

it? Do we have, do we have a innovation addiction?

So, I mean, I think if we I think there are two

really quite distinct categories of thing we need to worry about,

because they're caused by different mechanisms. One is the

deliberate destruction of the human species by decisions we

take, and one is the accidental destruction of the human species

unintended because of the side effects of decisions that we

take, right? So, in other words, you know, are we going to cause

our destruction because we want to? Basically, I would put a

nuclear war in that category. You know, we're kind of actually

making the choice to kill everyone. And I think that's a

very different that's there's a whole different set of

mechanisms there to when we worry about accidentally, you

know, creating mirror life, or letting an AI take over the

world, or whatever. And I think Peter's, you know, question

thoughts about, how have we evolved in such a way to make

this intrinsically problematic? Is a good place to start. So if

we take the problem of us deliberately destroying the

world by sort of just by analogy, if you think about

fights, that is actually quite hard to kill someone. Now, I

know you've killed many a person with your bare hands, trained

trade boxer, Yep, yeah, yeah, exactly. But it's actually, it's

actually quite hard. It is somewhat harder than people.

Yeah, attacks with a gun are 30 times more lethal than attacks

with no gun, right? For example. Okay, now, if we'd have evolved,

if we'd have had guns, if we'd evolved with guns built into our

fists, it's entirely plausible to me that we would have evolved

much less of a tendency to get into fights. We would be much

better at standing down, because the risk would be so much higher

getting involved, right? So clearly our we've evolved have a

level of aggression where it's quite hard to cause that much.

Damage. Now we can't that level of aggression extended to the to

the levels of, you know, at the country level, is, is, therefore

becomes extremely problematic when you've invented, you know,

AI drones and nuclear bombs and, you know, bio weapons. So, so

that, I think is sort of thinking about it from an

evolutionary point of view, that what Peter is talking about on

the kind of deliberate destruction side, you know, is

that we have an urge to destroy things where our which is way

out of line with our capacity to actually destroy things, like

our urge to destroy things. It's almost like our technology for

destruction is catching up with our urge, and I, and I sort of

think, well, you know, if there was, if everyone had access,

well, okay, so why haven't we destroyed the world? You might

say, Well, why are we, why are we all still? Why is the murder

rate going down? Why is there less war? Which is a good

question. But if, if I said, you know, well, actually, we're

gonna give everyone in the world a button, and if anyone presses

it, everyone dies, right? You know perfectly well, some, some

idiot, would press that button, right? So it sort of feels to me

like, well, we know that someone out there would do it if they

could, just for long, right? So feel so actually, there really

is. It's not like, well, we can rest assured that this won't

happen. All we're saying is, well, it's just at the moment

sufficiently hard for someone to do it. And if it gets to some

level of where a man in a shed can create a global killing

thing and decide to just do it, I think we can all assume

someone would right. So that's the problem, I think, is that,

you know, there is nothing in us that stops it from happening. Is

what I'm saying. We get to the correct level of destructiveness

if it becomes cheap enough to destroy the world, some wanker

is going to do it well.

And if you, if you take the scale down in terms of

scale of lethality, if you, if you look at it's a boring topic,

but it's relevant here the idea of gun control that you know, if

you give enough guns to people, some of them are going to go

berserk and go and shoot lots of people. Now, if you scale that

up to, you know, large scale lethality. If everybody had,

like, you say, a nuclear bomb, then we already know the, you

know, going, going into a school and shooting lots of people is

already a pretty, pretty high threshold for for sort of

destructive, destructiveness.

Or you've got people like, you know, Andreas Lubitz,

who was that German wings pilot who crashed the plane exactly

when you think, well, if he'd have been able to crash a plane

with a million people on it, probably wouldn't have changed

his if anything, he might have been more up, you know. So,

yeah, yeah,

I think, I think it doesn't really hinge on it

being deliberate destruction, though. I think it's, I think

that I think there may be a tendency, even though, you know,

accidental disruption. So when we were, when we built the

atomic bomb and then the hydrogen bomb, we we, we weren't

deliberately setting out to try to put ourselves in a position

that we could destroy the world. They were, they were sort of

tactically, at the time, rational things to do. It's

like, this is, this is a world, and at that time, this is a war

ending weapon. So we need to get that, and that will cause Japan

to surrender. Then it became, because the technology then

existed, it became a sort of race to produce more and more

and more than we and they are, over a decade or so, we got to

the point where actually this was a, this was a world ending

weapon. But before that point, it was a, sort of, it was a

rational thing to do.

Yeah, I'm not saying that's partly the problem. Yeah,

you know is that it gets not, there's not, it's not, in a

sense, it is rational because we do want to kill people. We want

to have the technology to kill people, so it makes sense to

invent it. What I'm saying is that the methods you would use

to stop it happening, the regime that you would have to impose to

stop it from happening, just looks very different if you're

worrying about a deliberate choice to kill people versus

accidentally killing everyone in the world. They're different

kinds of mechanisms. And I think, you know, you can deter

people in a different way, right? You need to impose

different mechanisms, I think, on but, but I'm just saying are

one, one key mechanism of deliberately destroying the

world is that, what we can't deny is we definitely, some

people do want

to do that. Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. Yeah.

I think you might be getting close to what I

want to ask, right? Which is, okay, do we contain the seeds of

our own destruction? Right? More or less, that's the question we

want to ask, right? And I can see that it's interesting. But

why are we discussing this? What's the value? What's the

what's Well,

what do we do about it? Right? Because, because the

problem is that. That destructive technology is going

to get worse, and I think on a large scale, obviously, well,

nuclear weapons technology haven't, hasn't really. It's

certainly not become super cheap. And in fact, you know,

you look at the data, and there's fewer nuclear weapons

around now than there were, you know, 30 years ago, killing

people has become easier. We've got murder drones, and yet

murder rates and rates of deaths in war have fallen right, see?

So what are we getting right? Is the is the question, because we

want to be doing more of that like and I think what we haven't

we've only really just started seeing what the impact of, say,

drones are, but actually being able to kill a million people

with drones might turn out to be much easier and cheaper than

killing a million people with a nuclear bomb, and more efficient

and more efficient. And in fact, you can, just then you can, you

get the whole city, whereas

it could be morally superior. Well,

we're not even worrying about that. The point

is, you know, it's a new it's the latest thing to have to

worry about, what do we do? What did we get right with nuclear

weapons or with any other technology, which means that we,

you know, actually all of the trends in violence are positive,

like despite the fact that destruction is easier and

cheaper than it was in the past. What have we got right that

makes it that's that has been. Is that a question

you want to answer right now? Yeah.

Well, yeah. Why not? Are you proposing this as a

question? Well, I'm just at what we I think that's why you said,

Why are we asking the question? And the answer is, because

we've, I don't know about you phrase, but I don't want

everyone in the world to be killed. So the question is, what

should we do about

it? Just select people, yeah,

yeah, okay, where do we go with this? Who's

next?

I mean, I before we do that. I mean, I thought

occurred to me, I came to sort of extend this a little bit

further, that perhaps our innate capacity and our innate drive to

produce ever more dangerous technologies is actually a

potential solution to the Fermi Paradox. I think maybe that.

Maybe it's the case that any sufficiently complex

intelligence that evolves must necessarily have curiosity, risk

taking and competitiveness that causes it to be dangerous and

cause it to eventually, there's a sort of an technological

determinism means that you eventually strike upon atomic

weapons and biochemistry, bio weapons and things, and that

will lead event, on average, will lead, lead to extinction Of

the species. Yeah. So I think there's

a tragedy of the commons kind of argument that,

yeah, we just, you know, the possibility of cooperation is

just too hard and unsustainable, and affection is always going to

be better. And hey, Preston's

dilemma, because, yeah, that's but it's hard for

the innate kind, the kind of the kind of intelligent intelligence

that will win out in a bio, sort of crude biological evolutionary

world, if you could prod it differently, and you could have

more peaceful beings because they had guns on their arms,

then maybe they find cooperation and coordination much easier,

but it's just that in the biological world, because of the

limited amount of damage you can do person on person, that just

doesn't scale very well as you get more and more complex.

Yeah, and there's also the problem that humans are

quite like we have a small number of children, which

doesn't sound like terribly like relevant, but actually it means

that we're not we are incentivized to cooperate

intrinsically with quite a small number of people. Yeah, so we're

only really related to a very small number of people, and

hence we only really care about and do things altruistically for

a small number of people, because, you know, we have got a

lot of investment in our own offspring. Yeah, whereas, if you

take bees, they've all got one mum, all bees have got one mum,

and they're all sisters, except for the drones, who, it doesn't

matter. They just their only job is to mate with the queen and

then die, right? So a whole beehive can all work together

individually, because they're all essentially the same.

They're all invested in the same set of genes. So option number

one is we just have one we like Queen Camilla, or whatever she

is, like a random having all the children. And, you know, we

genetically engineer things so that we're all just, you know,

we're basically like bees. You know. Well, I mean, you know.

But if, if we have enough bio technology to engineer, you

know, to engineer bio weapons, yeah, I mean, I think we could

re engineer human.

I mean, I think, I think there are ways doing it

without, directly bio without turning into. Please. Yeah, and

I think, I think the counter argument to the the fact that

intelligence is is the problem, but intelligence could also be

the antidote to the problem, because we are capable of moral

reasoning and an empathy and things we are capable of it. So

maybe what we need to do is train ourselves to be better at

doing those things. So and so we know. So we know we can move

away from the constraints of the biological intelligence we have.

Maybe we, you know, maybe when we start uploading our brains to

computers, or maybe just drilling hard and home, the

moral reasoning is a thing you must do from an earlier age. You

know, we were then capable of sort of, sort of meta

revolution, that we're then able to drive our evolution in a

cognitive space, rather than in a you're

saying, why the solution is, why can't we all

just get along? Why Can't We? Well, actually, I mean, the

thing is that, Stephen, I mean, Steven Pinker's argument in the

better angels of our nature is that, you know, because the fact

that the trends in violence and all sorts of other indicators

are all what we would regard as positive, suggests that our kind

of political and social technology is outpacing our

destructive technology development. And his his view is

that, you know, our ability to have a say, a strong state, to

punish people, to reliably detect and punish wrongdoers,

has has actually outpaced, you know, the ability of those

wrongdoers to cause death and mayhem. And I find that quite

plausible. And in fact, you know, if you think about, well,

what technology does that rely on? It relies on a certain

amount of ability to, you know, centralise power, but also to be

able to detect things, to be able to identify that this

person did that wrong thing, or that they're going to, you know,

that we kind of detect that someone's acquired the

precursors to a bio weapon

we've seen We've got a like our social

technologies, our institutions and things we have now are way

more complicated and way more capable than our little You

know, when we were people living on the planes, travelling around

for scraps and bonking the heads of each other with mallets and

things, we didn't need anything like that. It's amazing that we

have got big state institutions and international treaties and

things.

Yeah, I just, I just worry that the this idea

that the the instinct to be peaceable and survive alongside

one another, is going quicker than our ability to invent

things to kill one another, and our drive to kill each other At

some point, like with, for example, mutually assured

destruction, you only get one go, right? So, so, like guns

scale, you know? And it's like, okay, well, back in the day, we

used to have lots of fist fights. Now we have far fewer

gun fights, right? That works. But when you get to the stage of

cataclysmic risk. You only, you only need to get it. What wrong?

Once, right? So how, how can you outpace that? You can't.

But then, if you look at what we actually did, it was

things like, you know, you'd make these commitments, but then

they'd be monitored. You know that you would actually count is

this person you know, either have they decommissioned these

weapons, and then you know that you're, you're monitoring

where's the nuclear material, and there's kind of

sophisticated global system of trying to make sure people

aren't doing that. And you could imagine doing a similar thing

for, you know, for kind of AI drones, you could say, well, you

know, we're gonna have a limit on the number of of drones that

each country is allowed to have. And it feels a long way away

that we could imagine that happening now, but I think all

it would take is the equivalent of another Hiroshima or Nagasaki

committed by drones to make people go or we should do

something right.

My concern with the the social technologies

we've got for controlling it is they feel fragile. They feel

much more fragile than our drive to find ever more unpleasant

ways to kill each other.

Go and see what you're going to say. Well, I was

just going to say, thus far we've only, we've only

touched on deliberate, yeah. Well, I was all. I was just

going to bridge into that by saying, well, well, I I'm not

quite, I'm not so sure it's totally binary, like that, that

there are things we do to kill one another, and there are

things we do by accident. I sort of feel like, although nuclear

bombs, obviously, you know, have a purpose, and guns have a

purpose, something like a knife is multi purpose. And you know,

if I throw a knife at you in order to wound you, but it hits

you in the heart and I kill you. I go, Oh, dear, you know, oops.

That was a that was manslaughter, not murder or

something. So I'm not quite so sure that we've got this really

clear distinction. So AI being an example, you might generate

AI and use it in a variety of sort. Circumstances. Some of

those might be lethal. Some of those might not be lethal. Some

of them might be sort of intended to be, like policing

robots or something that suddenly become, you know, fully

lethal killing machines. That it's isn't the distinction

between what we accidentally do to kill one another and what we

deliberately neglect, I suppose, yeah, is not quite so clear cut,

yeah, although, I mean, I think there's a different set of

things you would want to do. Let's imagine that we could

solve we were absolutely guaranteed that nobody would

want to destroy the world. So we'll put that on a shelf and

pretend that we've solved the problem of people wanting to

destroy the world. Well, then we have the next category of thing

to worry about, which is, what about accidentally doing it?

Yeah. How do we stop that?

Okay, so that's we're going to move on to next,

right? Am I right? Like, how do we stop this stuff accidentally

happening?

Yeah, before we how do we foresee consequences

that we didn't foresee, which kind

of leads, which sort of connects to something

I've been thinking about and I've not been able to stop

thinking about the last 10 minutes, right? Which I can't

get off the bees, right? Bees, yeah. And the reason why is,

let's say they've got this system which works really well,

and it means they don't do sort of mad things like kill them,

keep sharks. They're all related, but I feel really bad

for them, because they live on a planet with a bunch of people

who, who they're going to get killed because of us, right? And

it's something outside of their control, please? Yeah, the bees

have figured it all out, but then these sort of highly

evolved monkeys that have come along and then, and then we, we

destroy the plant, we destroy the bees along with us. And I

just feel bad because, you know, the bees have figured it out,

and, you know, they get sort of done in.

There's a great deal more moral weight than just

our own species. We have a sort of moral responsibility for the

rest of the world, and not only the rest of the world, but all

the potential species that might come about after we've gone,

yeah. So we can't, we mustn't snuff out life completely. We

mustn't, yes, no,

fish, fish, yeah, yes. And there are all the other

we have to respect our piece to peace

accord with the fish that we've settled upon podcast.

And we did do that, yeah, but it also, I'm

sure, that

this fragile cease fire, Twix Twixt, land and sea

Exactly, exactly.

And I'm sure in our sort of discussions, you

know, logically, external for this just fits into really, you

know, stuff, external forces over which have no control.

That's what we are to the bees, right? Anyway, I've diverted us.

Nick, oh no, so was it you? Peter, who was going to come in

with some Yeah. So I think it boils down to

like, it's unforced. It's unforeseen, so unforeseen

consequences that we want to be able to foresee, isn't it? So

when we create a new technology, everything's, oh, great,

brilliant. We've got, we've got, we've got nuclear power.

Brilliant, this is we're getting into unknown, unknowns. This is

what we're talking about. This sort of is a bit, yeah, gone.

But it's like we go because we make a new technology, but it's

only, Only later did, but does it become apparent, perhaps,

through, you know, nuclear weapons, they were okay, not

great things, but they were okay, if, as long as they were

only a very small number in the world, they were quite useful as

a tactical weapon of war. But when you get several, when you

get so many that you can destroy everything on the earth several

times over, and not only that, but extinguish any hope of life

regaining a foothold. That the case is the same for AI, mirror

life and various other existential risks, that that's

that that's that's a problem. But we didn't at the time

foresee that that was a problem. It's only when we started to

scale up did people go Hold on this situation now means that

this could occur.

Yeah, and I think this is by analogy with, you

know, our aggression levels being misaligned to our

technology, our capability to destroy things. I think our

levels of scare, of fear. What we're scared of is also, you

know, misaligned to how scary things actually are. You know,

because we've really only evolved to be scared of snakes

and things. Yeah, we haven't really, yeah, we haven't really,

we haven't really evolved the means the correct level of sort

of scaredness of things like, you know, cars than we are, are

much less scared of snakes.

Yeah, although they do kill up to 75,000 people per

year, snakes still not as many as hippos or as

cars, as many as cars, more than hippos. Wow. Anyway, seems like

we should all be really scared of snakes all of a sudden, but,

but the point is that, you know, and particularly when it comes

to these sort of abstract risks, like, you know, the kind of AI

takeover problem, which you have to explain to someone. You've

got to sit down and tell them a story about how this could

happen. And then at the end, they'll go, yeah, that's not

gonna happen. Come on, you know? And I think at least nuclear

bombs come free with an enormous, terrifying fireball.

But AI takeover doesn't really look like anything scary until

it's way too late. And so, you know, it is those kinds of

risks. And same with mirror life. It's like, well, nothing

looks that scary to us. It's a bacterium. We're not

intrinsically scared. I mean, nuclear weapons are

intrinsically scary, but a lot of these things that could just

kill us all just they're picture in a magazine, aren't they?

Yeah. I mean, I think it's quite interesting the

extent to which awareness in the public consciousness is a is a

deterrent to us developing technologies. So, so you know,

if you, if you talk to most people about the threat of AI,

they think of Skynet, right and terminators to get scary robots,

right? Exactly, but, but, or how right, you know, but, but

psychotic robots. Psychotic robots. But the the role of

science fiction, dystopian post apocalyptic fiction is to, is to

basically tell that story in a way that sticks in in people's

minds. If, and if you look at there, I would say there is a

large portion of popular resistance to the development of

AI that is based on this idea of killer weapon systems and, you

know, Robocop and all that kind of stuff. But if you always so

mirror life, like very few, it's not in anybody's public

consciousness, right? Nobody's written a novel about it. Hasn't

been a blockbuster film about it. But if you look at something

like cloning, human cloning, and the the way, quite quickly,

people were weirded out and thought, you know, that should

be a sight, Whoa, don't. Don't go there. That's there's

something partly, it's in the public consciousness. Partly,

it's like, you say, inherently creepy. Creepy, right, exactly.

And pregnancy, too. It feels like a couple of

things I want to say we need to draw to a conclusion soon, but

it feels like we're talking about something we've talked

about before, which is perception of risk, maybe, which

is, you know, I'm probably more scared of sharks and guns. Four

people a year, really killed by sharks, exactly. That's

terrifying, right? Yeah, and I should probably be more scared

of of of cheeseburgers, right? That's actually more people die

of choking on a cheeseburger. Well, I hadn't even thought of

cheese, but I was just thinking

of sharks die from choking on humans.

Yeah, and no one talks about that. I'm glad you

brought that up. But the second thing, it's all, it's all very

human centric and Earth centric, you know, because us worrying

about, you know, the destruction of our planet, Earth and so on.

But the universe doesn't, kind of doesn't really care, right?

And it's, I don't know, it just occurs to me, you know, the

only the kind of nihilist who pressed the red

button, yeah, yeah, universe out. There's probably some other

aliens. They'll be all

right, yeah. Now, to be fair, I get it. It's

what we've got. All we've got is ourselves, our lives, our

planet, etc. But, you know, it's sort of, ultimately, it's true,

though, isn't it? Depressingly, it kind of doesn't really

matter. But then, yes, well, if that doesn't matter, then

nothing does. Exactly, that's why I'm an honest why I'm

honest. So So look, we do need to finish off. So I go to Peter

first, and then, you know, we need to wrap this up.

Yeah, so just picking up on Chris's point that

considering exercise at risk is not in the public sort of

discourse. I don't think it's nearly enough. It needs to be

much more in the public discourse. The fact Fraser

hadn't heard of mirror life is damning indictment of Fraser

sort of awareness of important, important things in the world.

So the fact, luckily, he's got absolutely no power to

do

anything if a

mirror Fraser was

no one person does, but as your population

gets more aware of this as a problem, then things start to

change. So like the the fact that everyone now worries about

recycling and global warming is starting to shift the perception

and the and the expectation on our political leaders. So the

fact that it's an existential risk. Basically means, if it

come, if it happens, the cost is infinite. The cost of that

catastrophe is infinite, which means, if the probability is at

all, non zero, which is because it could happen, then it must,

then it should, dominate all other discussions,

Pascal's Wager

style, yeah, so it's like the fam, whereas now,

yeah, we still, we still worry about who's going to be the next

trivial, actually infinite, because we're not

going to devote an infinite amount of resources to stopping

it. So, you know, it has to be bounded. The existence of life

still has. A bounded value. We're not really agreed on what

that is. Well, nothing, according to Fraser, yeah, zero,

according to him, but and, but somewhere between zero and

infinity. So we pinned it down quite nicely. Yeah?

Okay, that feels like a very satisfying, nice

conclusion there. Yeah, nailed it. Okay, look, I got a

question, yeah, let's do it from fiction. Probably doesn't have

to be necessarily favourite existential risk, or, I suppose,

favourite apocalypse.

Yeah, I guess I'll go with Douglas Adams and the

idea that we're a sort of traffic, or rather, we're

roadworks being being performed to clear, clear a path through

the through the universe?

Yes, so you're picking up on my that's like, on

the sort of spectrum of where I am,

I like, I like the idea that we sit here and we

consider all of these serious type risks, and that in the end,

we might be wiped out by something very trivial and

amusing.

Maybe it's embarrassing. Maybe, yeah, like

road works through our part of the solar system, galaxy, or

someone forgetting not firing all the telephone cleaners or

something like that, right? Good one.

Chris, I just realised how, how normally try

to keep it light at the end. This is not the likeness of

question, be fair. It's a pretty heavy

subject to start with, but yeah,

my favourite? Well, my not my favourite, not

the one I worry the most about, either one that occupies the

most time in my head, but the one I kind of think is

potentially quite lols. Is the way if humanity were to evolve

into a less brainy, more fertile version of ourselves, kind of

imagine the

Idiocracy, yeah.

Movie, yeah. And, or the or there is kind of like,

wall e the movie. The Wall e the movie where everything's every

ever we've advanced our technologies, where all of our

requirements are kind of taken care of automatically for us,

which means we can just sit around watching, yeah,

that's like the kind of Brave New World type of

dystopia where everyone's actually really happy, but it's

dystopian,

sometimes called a dysgenic situation. But yeah,

we're but, and maybe AI will will facilitate Yeah, for us, we

can just sit around eating and

fucking Yeah. So it doesn't, it doesn't, doesn't

kill us by actually killing us. It just makes us Yeah,

it puts us in a little box, makes us dumb.

Sounds, all right, yeah, Nick,

I think my fact, because this actually mirror

life, made me think of this. I think it's really imaginative.

Is ice nine, which I think is Ray. Is it Ray Bradbury, or, I

can't remember if it's him or but it's a story about a new

type of water molecule that is kind of ice at kind of room

temperature. Basically, it's a Okay, and so. So all of the

water in the entire world just freezes, because this one

molecule kind of ends up converting all the other water

into itself. So, yeah, ice nine gradually. So obviously all the

water in your body freezes, everything the earth just turns

into a great big, you know, Ice Cube made of ice nine. I think

it's very cool idea, but it's not unlike the mirror life

thing.

There is a, there is a version of that. There's a

good, great cooker video that that's actually physically

plausible.

Oh, okay, we should start worrying about

matter, which is something to do with the

configuration of the subatomic particles inside the quarks,

which mean you can get a special kind of quark, or too many of

the special kind of quarks together. And if the problem

with that is that any other protons and neutrons that that

that proton, that weird proton, interacts with, get converted to

the same sort

so we've got to keep an eye on these quarks to stop

them all getting together in the same

try and dig it out for the show notes. Yeah,

worth of view. But, yeah, there's a sort of version of

that. So it's like, it becomes, like the Midas touch, that

anything a particle of that touches, turns into more of

that.

Okay, yeah, well, it's like those prions. They're

another thing that calls kreutzfeldt Jakob disease, you

know, Mad Cow Disease. Okay? They're basically a, I think

they either a mirror image or just a particular kind of

protein or something that that your body can ingest but can't

then process or deal with, yeah? But they also, they're kind of

self replicating, which is why they're so scary. If they get

into the food chain, then they start spreading everywhere,

which is why you shouldn't do that.

That's why they're not a good thing. Yeah,

prawns are bad. Yeah. So I have to say, I mean, I don't really

have one beyond what we've talked about. But I don't like

the sound of everything turning to ice. I like the sound of

that. I have to say, I did quite like the sound of Peter's one,

like just the eating and being caught in a box. Yeah? Patient,

yeah, that sounded All right. So I'll go with that one. Pretty

much your life at the moment. Well, that's why I try. Is what

I aim for. Yeah? Okay, so we're. Stop there. You've been

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