[joshuaissac]

Why not create mirror viruses to infect these mirror bacteria? And mirror predators to consume the mirror bacteria. Or compound microbes that can eat both mirror bacteria and regular bacteria, so that we can deploy them before we create mirror bacteria. For example, there is already a bacterium that can eat L-sugar, which is a mirror of regular sugar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-Glucose

Once the mirror creature is big enough, it will not matter that it is an indigestible mirror creature, as the predator will eat it regardless. So we only need to create mirror predators up to a certain level.

[ceejayoz]

> Why not create mirror viruses to infect these mirror bacteria? And mirror predators to consume the mirror bacteria.

"No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death."

[joshuaissac]

The risk is of the rhetorical winter taking too long to roll around, and mirror life forms managing to hold on for long enough to gain the ability to feed on non-mirrored nutrients. In the worst-case scenario, with no predators, they could rapidly outcompete and replace the bottom end of the ecosystem, resulting in the collapse of everything above, which would be far worse than the slow-growing infectious diseases described in the article.

[PhasmaFelis]

Microscopic organisms mutate rapidly and unpredictably, so this sounds like a "swallow a spider to catch the fly" situation.

[scotty79]

Mirror bacteria evolving the ability to eat normal sugar would be the killer.

[roywiggins]

The report suggests releasing mirror phages, but they could only control the bacteria, not eliminate them. And they would likely evolve resistance so we'd have to somehow boot up an entire ecosystem of phages to keep things under control.