Astrum Space - Scientists Warn: This Is the Deadliest Threat to Life on Earth | Astrum Earth

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

In December 2024, a group of 38 scientists came together to warn the rest of mankind about a seemingly-innocent but deadly threat… mirror life. Born from the fundamental asymmetry that underpins many molecules on Earth, mirror life is a rapidly-developing area of research that scientists say we must put a stop to now – or suffer the consequences. But what actually is mirror life? Why has this gotten the science community so worried? And what would really happen if we crossed this biological milestone? From Alex McColgan and the Astrum team comes an illuminating new adventure that turns our gaze homeward. Astrum Earth invites you to rediscover the most extraordinary planet in our universe - our very own Earth.Journey with us as we explore Earth's most captivating mysteries and marvels, from the global dance of El Niño to the intricate rhythms that have sustained life for billions of years. With the same meticulous research and breathtaking visuals that define Astrum, we'll reveal our planet's stories in unprecedented detail.Narrated by James Stewart, Astrum Earth promises to transform how you see the world beneath your feet and the skies above. Because to truly understand the cosmos, we must first understand home.Discover our new Astrum Earth YouTube channel: hhttps://www.youtube.com/@AstrumEarth

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at Yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. Mirror Mirror on the wall. Who is the most dangerous of them all? Well, the answer might be looking right back at you. The idea of mirror life

might sound like something from a science fiction novel, but it's a very real possibility that could spell disaster for life as we know it. Imagine an organism that was almost like us, but not quite, the perfect mirror image, right down to its DNA, proteins and sugars. What would that look like? And what would be the consequences of it coming into existence? A group of 38 scientists have thought about these questions and recently published a 299-page report on the feasibility and risks of mirror bacteria. Their takeaway message? Do not go there. But will the temptation be too

much to resist? Like the atomic bomb, the moon landing or artificial intelligence. Could mirror life be another inevitable milestone in our ambitious human existence? I'm James Stewart's and you're watching Astrom Earth. In this video, we're going through the looking glass to understand what mirror life is, and why scientists are so worried about the consequences of creating it. We'll see how so-called mirror organisms could be different to us, and how their behaviours could pose some major risks to the existing life on our planet. Before we delve into possibilities that are thankfully still the stuff of science fiction, let's look at what's gotten scientists so concerned in the first place, because although we don't currently have mirror life, the potential to

created is very real. In chemistry, many molecules have something we call chirality, which is a kind of asymmetry where the molecule can exist as either left or right-handed, or L and D. They would reflect each other, but you wouldn't be able to superimpose one over the other. To demonstrate this, simply look at your hands. They are mirror images. You can clap them together, but you can't lay one on top of the other and get them to match. Well, the same is true. of molecules. You can get left and right-handed glucose, nucleotides, amino acids and many more. This is an example of isometry, because if you wrote down the chemical formulae for these molecules, they would be the same. There are two main groups of isomers in chemistry,

structural isomers and stereo isomers. The group we're talking about here are stereo isomers, where molecules have the same atoms and bonds between them, but a different arrangement in space. When the molecules are mirror images of each other, we call them enantiumers, but when they aren't, they are diastereomas. That might be a lot to get your head around, so here's an example. You know lactic acid as the acid that makes your muscles ache during a workout, but it exists as L and D stereoisomers. Both molecules have the same formula which is on your screen now, and the same covalent bonds between atoms, but they are mirror images of each other, or enantiumers. So, we know these L and D isomers are actually found in nature, but let's start

thinking on a larger scale. We often describe biology as being hierarchical, because systems are structured with increasing levels of complexity as you zoom out. atoms organize into molecules which organize to form organelles, cells, tissues, organs and so on, all the way up to whole ecosystems. When you think about biological organisation this way, you can see why the existence of stereoisomers could make mirror life a possibility. There doesn't seem to be a particular reason why. But life on earth evolved to use specific enantyamers for specific biomolecules. We have left-handed amino acids, which make left-handed proteins, right-handed nucleotides, which make right-handed DNA and RNA, and right-handed sugars, which make right-handed carbohydrates.

But imagine if things had been ever so slightly different, and life had evolved to use left-handed nucleotides, or right-handed amino acids. It seems crazy that such a small change could make a big difference. but think back to the hierarchy. Mirror molecules organised to make mirror organelles, mirror cells, and before you know it, mirror life. Now it suddenly seems less science fiction and more like something we should be talking about. There's a big difference between knowing something is possible and actually being able to produce it though. So how close are we?

Well, the good news is we're still a long way from bringing the mirror world to life. And before you fall into the uncanny, valley and imagine cities full of mirror people, we're not talking that extreme. We can't create normal cells from scratch yet, let alone mirror ones. The most likely achievement for the future of mirror biology would be to create a mirror bacterium, and this is the focus of that 290-page report I mentioned at the start. It's impossible for a mirror bacterium to evolve from existing life, because it would involve too many fundamental changes to its molecules. This means it's up to us if we want to create a mirror bacterium.

And there are two major ways to do it, bottom up and top down. If we went through a bottom up approach, we'd have to start basically from scratch, synthesizing enough mirror biomolecules to boot up the first mirror bacterium. We are making progress towards this, though. In 1992, Stephen Kent and colleagues managed the first synthesis of a mirror image protein by solid phase peptide synthesis or SPPS, where amino acids are added in a stepwise process with the help of a solid polymer support. Using this method, you can make several shorter amino acid chains and join them together to make large mirror image proteins. And this has been done for

several bacterial enzymes. With mirror enzymes comes the even bigger possibility of transcribing mirror RNA. And in 2022, Heng Xiao and Tingzhou managed to use their enzymes to transcribe L-RNAs as long as 2.9 kilo bases. To put that in context, that's almost the same length as three of the average bacterial genes. Though the bottom-up method offers more control over each step of synthesis, scientists estimate that you need at least 100 mirror proteins to make the ribosomes and other machinery needed for a mirror bacterium. We may have succeeded in making a few mirror proteins, but some may be trickier to make than others,

and the whole process is likely to be really expensive. On the other hand, the top-down approach would mean reproducing the cellular content of a natural chirality bacterium with mirror components, until it is capable of surviving and replicating on its own. This could be easier than the bottom-up method, as you can exploit the existing cellium machinery to just use mirror components, though there might also be more chance of error here. In a roundabout way, we've already done a lot of relevant research on this

with genetic code reprogramming. Scientists have been interested in seeing if they can expand protein synthesis to use non-canonical amino acids or N-CAAs, as this could create proteins with exciting new properties. Daniel Delatore and Jason Chin reviewed these efforts in their article reprogramming the genetic code. NCAAs have already been incorporated into protein synthesis by model organisms like E. coli. If we can get bacterial cells to use mirror NCAAs, then the resulting polymers could bring us a step closer to creating a mirror bacterium.

Regardless of whether we use a bottom-up or top-down approach, scientists think we're still at least a decade away from actually bringing a mirror bacterium to life. But thinking ahead to 2035 then, well, what could happen if we reach this biological milestone? Okay, we're in the future. We've managed to create the world's first mirror bacterium. What would it be like?

Pretty fragile, actually. But once you have one, it wouldn't be hard to make it more robust with some standard genetic engineering techniques. These same techniques could be used to make other strains of mirror bacterium, by altering the genetic code to introduce more variation. This is where things start to take on their own shape. Since the mirror bacteria should be able to do everything a natural bacterium can, only mirrored, then HGT or horizontal gene transfer would be in their repertoire. One of the ways that scientists could try to contain the mirror bacteria

would be to introduce oxotrophy, meaning that it wouldn't be able to produce all the nutrients needed for growth by itself. In other words, it would be at least somewhat reliant on us for survival and wouldn't be able to colonise new environments on its own. But with HGT, there's a problem. Say one mirror bacterial strain has a different kind of oxytrophie to another or has managed to overcome its oxytrophy through mutation. Horizontal gene transfer would allow the non-oxetrophic myrobin bacterium

to spread this ability really fast. All of a sudden, your mirror bacterium can stand on its own two proverbial feet and is ready to fly the nest. Even if this didn't happen naturally, we'll learn soon that the potential for mirror bacteria to be used in biological warfare is significant, and so it could be the goal of lots of terrorists, groups to overcome these containment measures. So if the worse happens and the mirror bacteria can

break free of the lab, what are the risks? The authors of the 299 page report broke these down into two major concerns, infection and environmental survival and spread. Let's look at infection first, because a major feature of any mirror bacterium is the fact it will interact very differently to any existing life on the planet. There are millions of processes happening in your body that rely on specific chiral interactions, enzymes binding with substrates, cellular recognition, sensory processing, and many more. All of these are built around the expectation that certain molecules have a certain corality. But when you flip everything around, suddenly you become a lot worse at all these things. This can be both disastrous and desirable, depending on what you are.

want to achieve. For these reasons, the way that mirror bacteria could play into our health is a bit of a two-sided coin. One of the main motivations for creating mirror bacteria is their potential for immune invisible live cell therapeutics. Because our bodies would be much worse at detecting the presence of a mirror bacterium as opposed to a regular one, this would allow them to pass by undetected, which would be amazing if we engineered them to do something specific for us.

are great at sensing the environment around them. So if we can make a mirror bacterium that could avoid the human immune response, seek out the site of an infection, a tumour or any other problems, and secrete drugs, well, that would be a major breakthrough for disease treatment. Unfortunately, we also have to think about these mirror bacteria that haven't been engineered for drug therapy. Mirror Live could pose a major risk to human health, targeting lots of aspects of our normal immune response. As I mentioned before, there are a very risk. millions of interactions in our body that are built around dealing with only one enantioma of a molecule. If no other life uses the opposite enantyma, and you don't come across it very much in nature,

then why would you evolve otherwise? It makes sense as long as everything has a natural chirality, like us, but it leaves us vulnerable to any mirror bacterium coming onto the scene. So, let's look at some of the interactions that could be affected. in recognition is the first step in the immune response, and the cells that do this for us are macrophages and dendritic cells. Normally these cells detect microbe-associated molecular patterns known as MAMPs and express pattern recognition receptors, PRRs, which bind to them. The problem is that almost all known bacterial mamps detected by our PRRs are chiral, and so they

wouldn't recognise the flipped mamps of a mirror bacterium. Even if our PRRs were less sensitive than we thought and could still detect the mirror M-Amps, you would probably need a much higher M-Amp concentration to trigger the same PRR response. This would make our first line of defence much weaker than normal, meaning the mirror infection could spread further and last longer. Our innate immune response would also be affected by a mirror bacterial infection. Antimicrobial peptides or amps can detect the membrane of a pathogen and help to destroy it via a host of nasty attacks, like creating pores in the membrane, disrupting osmosis and many more. But like PRRs, these anti-microbile peptides also have specific

chiral targets, which wouldn't exist in a mirror bacterium. For example, amps usually block the synthesis of peptidoglycan, a major part of the defensive bacterial cell wall by binding to its precursors. But amps wouldn't recognise these precursors in a mirror bacterium, making these defences useless. So mirror bacteria would be warringly good at getting past our immune system without really having to try. It would be harder to engulf them by phagocytosis, bind to them with antibodies, create memory cells to remember them, or find the site of infection in the first place. And the consequences of this could be huge. Get a virulent enough mirror bacterium and we'd be looking after pandemic on a much larger scale than even COVID,

with a lot more struggle to create a vaccine. This also explains why mirror bacteria would be a target for biological warfare, as we alluded to earlier. At this point you might be thinking, but they're the same molecules only flipped. How can their effects be so different? Well, to answer, here's an example. If you've heard of thalidomide, you may know that it caused devastating birth, defects for children born in the 50s and 60s, after their mothers took the drug for morning sickness. But what you may not know is that the drug was an accidental mixture of two enantiomers.

One had the intended effect as a mild sedative, but the other disrupted normal fetal development and caused birth defects. If an unintentional mirror drug can cause that much unexpected damage, well, you can see how dangerous a mirror organism could be. We've talked about the health risks, but the other major concern of mirror life is how it would play into an ecosystem and evolutionary dynamics. Take a moment to think of evolution like a race. You have lots of racers who have all been running together over millennia. They've had time to adapt to each other and learn how each other runs. But imagine if you just dropped in a racer with roller skates instead of shoes like everyone else.

The other racers wouldn't be able to just put on roller skates this late into the race, and they wouldn't know how to catch up. It's not hard then to guess who would win the race. You'd find a similar problem if a mirror bacterium suddenly colonise an ecosystem. One slight consolation is that, like I said, mirror molecules are pretty scarce in nature. This means that any mirror bacterium that escaped into the environment would struggle to find the mirror nutrients it needs, causing it to be metabolically limited and grow more slowly. However, this might not be as big of a problem for mirror life,

as we thought. Photo-autotrophs use light and inorganic materials to make nutrients for growth, and these inorganic materials are found as achyral ions in the environment. This means that a mirror photo-o-troph like a cyanobacterium would have no trouble using these ions to make their mirror nutrients, meaning uninhibited growth. It's a bit harder for heterotrophes, which can't make their own food, but even they might be able to get around this problem. Once mirror bacteria are out in the world and exposed to selection pressures, even a suboptimal foraging strategy like utilizing a less efficient but more common mirror sugar instead of glucose could be quickly improved via natural selection. Even if the

environment was a no-go for mirror bacteria, there might be other ways to survive. We've established that they'd be pretty good at avoiding immune detection, so mirror bacteria could survive in a range of animal and plant hosts. With this comes a pathway to colonising the environment. When hosts die, either from mirror infection or for another reason, they begin to decompose, giving the mirror bacteria the chance to colonise wherever their hosts has died. This is likely to be soil or natural water bodies. And if colonization is successful, these areas could become environmental reservoirs for mirror life. In addition, survival is a product of both growth and mortality, and this is where the mirror bacterium has the big advantage. Because it's just

been dropped into the evolutionary race, the mirror bacterium would have no natural predators. No other organism has adapted to interact with it, and there would be a lag phase before anything could evolve to do so. Even if something like a bacterial phage did try to predate it, the mirror bacterium would be inherently and completely resistant, giving it a major fitness advantage. Mirror bacteria are made up of a completely different set of building blocks to any regular prey of bacteriophage, so it probably wouldn't have much use for mirror prey anyway. So you might not even get much of a selection pressure to evolve mirror predation, because the nutrition. benefits to its predators would be very low. Any life with no natural predators will have a much

lower mortality and therefore be able to survive in nature even if growth was slow at first. We're slowly building up to our worst-case scenario for mirror life here, but just how bad could things get? When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed-sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be. be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.

Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back. the $1.1 slice. He asks Co-Pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which

little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hank says, line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365, copilot.com slash work. The point where we would really have to batten down the hatches against MirrorLife

would be if a mirror species became invasive. Even in our current world of only natural chirality life, invasive species are the second biggest threat to biodiversity after land and sea use change. So imagine how much worse this would be if the invasives were mirror species with little to no natural predators. The IUCN defines invasive alien species as organisms that are introduced by humans into places outside their natural race. range and negatively impact native biodiversity. If we apply this to mirror species, it seems likely that they fit the description. Mirror species haven't naturally evolved, so technically they don't have a natural range anywhere

on the planet and would be invasive anywhere they colonised. As for whether they would negatively impact biodiversity, if the ideas we've already talked about aren't enough evidence for this, then let's think about a mirror bacterium's impact at an ecosystem level. Having no natural predators or competitors, a mirror bacterial population would be able to survive in the environment even if the growth was slow. With exposure to new environments, the mirror population would experience new selection pressures and therefore natural selection.

Bacteria naturally evolve quite fast because they have a fast mutation rate and short generation time, and this would be no different for a mirror bacterium. So we could expect rapid adaptation to the environment, which gives the mirror population a greater overall fitness. The greater the fitness of the mirror bacteria, the better they are at utilising resources in the environment. Natural resources like light, water, space and inorganic materials are limited in nature. But these examples are also all a chiral, so both mirror life and natural chirality life need them to function. With their high levels of fitness, mirror populations could beat us to the punch and leave us without enough to survive. Combined with the mirror bacterians potential as a pathogen, you can see why they might start having negative effects on biodiversity, especially at the ecosystem level.

If this happens, then mirror life will become another contributor to biodiversity loss in the Anthropocene, our modern age. we would see a loss of ecosystem services, soil degradation, worsening climate change and much more. But the difference with mirror life is that if it reaches this point, it will be next to impossible to do anything about. We can't magically give every organism the ability to recognise and destroy mirror life. And even if there was a way to introduce some resistance with genetic engineering, it would likely be too late. The lag I was talking about between exposure to a stressor like a mirror bacterium and adaptations for resistance means that a lot of damage would be done before we'd see a response and the mirror bacterium could just as easily evolve to resist the resistance.

Species would be stuck in an evolutionary arms race with a mirror species that definitely has the upper hand. Before you and I get too existential, it's important to remember that this is currently all theoretical. We need scientists to think of the worst-case scenario before it happens if we are to have any hopes of avoiding another mass extinction, so that's exactly what the report did. The outcome was a loud and resounding no to pursuing mirror life, but it's not just mirror life we should be watching out for. Let's quickly talk about xenobiology. What does this mean? Are there other areas of research that could be just as risky as mirror life? Well, yes,

and there's the name for it, xenobiology, is the study of manipulating biological devices and systems. The name comes from the Greek, Zenos, meaning stranger or alien, which makes sense because this research area can be applied to understand how life on other planets may have evolved. As we touched on earlier, there's no real reason why we evolved to use left-handed amino acids but right-handed sugars and so on. Probably it was just what was most abundant at the time. So it's possible that on a planet with the right conditions for life, but more opposite chirality molecules, life that was a mirror of our own would naturally evolve. Scientists have thought about this for other variations too.

What if the DNA and RNA bases were different? What if life was silicon based instead of carbon-based? And what if we use liquid ammonia instead of water? Any of these differences in the primordial soup could generate huge changes to the life that evolves. We know from the diversity of life on our planet that there is more than one way to evolve, but the fundamental cellular processes in these organisms have been consistent. If we could generate life with changes to the initial conditions, it would prove that aliens, with a totally different biology, can exist.

The point is, if any of these life forms were successfully created, we could see similar consequences to the ones we've just described for mirror life. Maybe a silicon-based organism would be much better at competing for resources, or an organism with different DNA will be much faster at adapting to the environment. We can't say for sure what would happen, but my guess is that, well, we don't really want to find out. So what do we take away from all of this? Well, Mirror Life is definitely a fascinating concept and can need us a really mind-bending thoughts about where it could all lead. Creating the world's first mirror bacterium would be like making an alien on our own planet. And like many major scientific discoveries, it would change everything we thought we knew about science.

A mirror bacterium could produce some really amazing changes to how we diagnose and treat disease, but could just as easily be the next major disease itself and a scary one of it. at that. Controlling the risks of a discovery like this would be tricky and hasn't been something we're historically, or even currently, very good at. Maybe that's why those 38 scientists are trying to nip this in the bud before we're even tempted to go there. We should use the Mirror Life Report to think carefully about other research being done within the field of xenobiology, as generating any kind of life with a different biology to our own could have similar consequences for us. Synthetic biology is an amazing area of research that can really push the boundaries

of what it means to be alive, but with great power comes great responsibility. And we need to be forward-thinking enough to do a proper risk assessment. Otherwise, mankind could end up like Victor Frankenstein, suffering at the whims of the mirror life we created.