How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; at which point everyone is left flat footed by having not researched it.
> How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it;
This is a function of how easy it is to do the banned thing, how easy it is to detect when it is being researched and what are the benefits of researching it.
Imagine as an example that we live in a world where there are no firearms, and we decide to ban their research and development. All three factors would be against the ban. It is relatively easy to make primitive firearms (all you need is metal working tools). It is hard to detect when someone is doing it (they can keep their firearms secret, and the tools and activity disguised as something else) and the firearm once developed will be of great benefit to whoever developed it.
So a blanket ban against firearms would be unstable. It wouldn't work.
Let's look at an other example. Nuclear weapons. They are much harder to create (you need a whole industrial project to develop the tech, lot of engineers, and lot of energy consuming processes), there are pre-cursor technologies you can monitor to have an early warning (uranium enrichment, centrifuges, etc), it doesn't have immediate benefits unless you also develop a reliable delivery mechanism for it.
And these are the factors while nuclear weapons don't proliferate everywhere. You can't buy them in the mall, smaller countries don't have them etc.
I don't know what the answer to these questions are for "mirror life" but the framework is the same.
How hard is to develop it? If a single dude in a shed can do it, there is probably no point banning it. It will happen sooner than later. If it requires coordinated effort from multiple research groups and industrial partners, then a ban might work.
How hard is detect when someone is developing it? Can they hide it? Is the process using common materials and equipment? Do they need to get stuff only people who develop mirror life would need?
But the final question is the most important: What do they win? If there is some military benefit to developing "mirror life" then we are lost, and it will be developed. If there is some big economic benefit a ban might work, but it will be an uphill battle. If there is no benefit to it, and it is just cool and interesting to do, it will be a lot simpler for a ban to hold.
That's a great framework for assessing it, thank you!
It seems to me that to a degree nuclear weapons show some of the problems with a research ban. I think that it's possible that nuclear weapons are proliferating just very slowly. The problem seems to be that once someone engages in forbidden research, then their rivals feel the need to as well. E.g. we allowed China to get a nuclear weapon so India decided they needed one which led to Pakistan needing one. More currently, we allowed Israel to get nuclear weapons so now Iran is likely trying to get them.
It's also notable that the two instances where people gave up nuclear weapons, Gaddafi and Ukraine; have both ended poorly for the people who gave them up.
All this to say, I wonder if it might be possible to slow research on a subject but not to stop it completely.
Belarus and Kazakhstan are vassal states of Russia now and for the foreseeable future; possibly they will be annexed officially at some point, like the Crimea and probably Donbas. Sweden would probably still be neutral if it hadn't given up its nuclear weapons; it seems to be at significant risk of being invaded by Russia again (it was invaded in the 18th century and again in the 19th), which is why it joined NATO in March. That, in turn, puts it at great risk of going to war this decade even if it doesn't get invaded, for the first time in 200 years.
It's unclear if Belarus and Kazakhstan really had nukes in the first place such that they could "give them up"—as with Ukraine, the nukes stationed there were Soviet nukes, controlled by Moscow.
South Africa does seem to be doing okay, though. It's not that likely to be invaded by Zimbabwe, and since the end of apartheid, a civil war is looking increasingly unlikely.
> Tokayev (...) went on to thank Russia for sending troops to help establish order.
> Russia's Defence Ministry stated that more than 70 planes were flying, around the clock, to bring Russian troops into Kazakhstan and that they were helping to control Almaty's main airport.
> Kazakh leadership including Kazakh Foreign Minister Mukhtar Tleuberdi did not condemn the Russian invasion and abstained on the UN vote to condemn it, but at the same time they refused to recognize the Russian states of Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic.
> In addition to sending humanitarian aid to Ukraine, the Kazakh military increased spending and training. (...)
> Russia suspended shipments of Kazakh oil after Tokayev’s statements at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, where he stated that Kazakhstan considered the DPR and LPR as “quasi-state entities” and would not recognize them. On the other hand, in spite of some tensions, Kazakhstan's relations with Russia remain strong and mostly friendly, as shown by Tokayev's visit to Moscow in November 2022. (...)
> In 2022, Kazakhstan agreed to share the personal data of exiled anti-war Russians with the Russian government. In September 2022, Kazakh authorities detained a Russian journalist who was wanted on charges of "discrediting" the Russian military. In December 2022, Kazakhstan deported a Russian citizen who fled mobilization.
I'm no expert in foreign relations, but to me, this sounds like the relationship between the Trump administration and the municipal government of Portland, Oregon, not like the relationship between France and Germany, the relationship between Argentina and Brazil, or even the profoundly unequal relationship between the US and Canada. Tokayev can posture a bit about disagreeing with Putin, but Russia will punish him, and when push comes to shove, he depends on Russian military support to stay in power; and when Russian dissidents or draft dodgers show up in Kazakhstan, he arrests and deports them. (Contrast Vietnam-War-era US draft dodgers fleeing to Canada.)
Argentina, Brazil. although they say brazil is just a few days away of developing a nuclear bomb if it decides to. It would not be able to throw it anywhere useful tho at maximum south american neighbors
Neither Argentina nor Brazil has ever had nuclear weapons, although both countries did historically produce low-grade enriched reactor fuel. Argentina resumed its enrichment activity in 02015. Brazil resumed its enrichment activity in 02006 but still does not have enough production capacity to supply even its minuscule fleet of nuclear power stations.
> Neither Argentina nor Brazil has ever had nuclear weapons
Brazil holds the key technologies to develop it and the sixth bigger deposit of uranium (with only 30% of the territory mapped). The navy is even currently developing a nuclear submarine that will be totally based on local technology.
There is no benefit to disease as a weapon they aren't containable nor faster than nukes.
You unleash green too ensuring your targets liquidation in 6 weeks they inform you to share your own defense against it or get nuked tomorrow. You share it but it adapts and everyone dies.
I think that the difference may be that there's relatively little benefit or desire to researching children falling out of planes and we have fairly easy ways to study the question indirectly (accelerometers, cadaver studies, animal studies, etc.).
Also, there are numerous examples throughout history of people performing evil human studies; so while people may not have studied children falling from planes, people have studied equivalent things.
Without directly addressing your proposed experiment, the history of aviation was filled with all sorts of grotesque experiments on humans. Absolutely disgusting stuff, like suffocating people to simulate high altitude flight. There was an ethical quandary about whether to use this data (IE, as citations).
If you can't get funding for your research, or publish under your real name if you do, it's certainly going curtail research at least. It could still happen if some nations refuse to endorse the ban, but there will at least be less of it, which means less risk.
We're not talking about a targeted weapon, we're talking about accidentally unleashing an unstoppable global pandemic. If only China is risking that, the odds are better for everyone.
This sort of rhetoric is disgusting, and likely the exact sort that will lead to mass death incidents in our lifetime. I hope you think about that when such comes to pass.
> How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; at which point everyone is left flat footed by having not researched it.
Someone's going to need to work it out, because if the problem of "how to ban existentially dangerous things" is not solved, eventually we'll be fucked.
And realistically, we're probably fucked, because humanity probably simply lacks the maturity to not fuck itself over at some point (e.g. because of the logic "if we don't do it someone else will" is scarily effective, and some people are just unhinged for really stupid reasons). We probably only made it this far because of external constraints limited what we could do.
Part of me thinks it may turn out that a that a full-scale nuclear war that knocks out industrial civilization (especially if it's followed by A Canticle for Leibowitz-style anti-intellectual social changes) may not be such a bad thing in the long run, if it buys humanity a few more millennia.
This is a function of how easy it is to do the banned thing, how easy it is to detect when it is being researched and what are the benefits of researching it.
Imagine as an example that we live in a world where there are no firearms, and we decide to ban their research and development. All three factors would be against the ban. It is relatively easy to make primitive firearms (all you need is metal working tools). It is hard to detect when someone is doing it (they can keep their firearms secret, and the tools and activity disguised as something else) and the firearm once developed will be of great benefit to whoever developed it.
So a blanket ban against firearms would be unstable. It wouldn't work.
Let's look at an other example. Nuclear weapons. They are much harder to create (you need a whole industrial project to develop the tech, lot of engineers, and lot of energy consuming processes), there are pre-cursor technologies you can monitor to have an early warning (uranium enrichment, centrifuges, etc), it doesn't have immediate benefits unless you also develop a reliable delivery mechanism for it.
And these are the factors while nuclear weapons don't proliferate everywhere. You can't buy them in the mall, smaller countries don't have them etc.
I don't know what the answer to these questions are for "mirror life" but the framework is the same.
How hard is to develop it? If a single dude in a shed can do it, there is probably no point banning it. It will happen sooner than later. If it requires coordinated effort from multiple research groups and industrial partners, then a ban might work.
How hard is detect when someone is developing it? Can they hide it? Is the process using common materials and equipment? Do they need to get stuff only people who develop mirror life would need?
But the final question is the most important: What do they win? If there is some military benefit to developing "mirror life" then we are lost, and it will be developed. If there is some big economic benefit a ban might work, but it will be an uphill battle. If there is no benefit to it, and it is just cool and interesting to do, it will be a lot simpler for a ban to hold.