[phkahler]

>> Mirror life would have no interoperability with normal life, in biochemical terms.

That sounds like a good thing but... Our food chain starts at the bottom with bacteria turning nutrients into bio-molecules right? These bacteria are eaten by other things going up the food chain ultimately to us. What if some bacteria got loose at that bottom level and started eating all the nutrients with no natural predators? What if it out-competed those with predators? That might be game over for life as we know it.

I'm NOT saying this would happen, just that it one of thousands of possible scenarios one can come up with that go very badly. No one can say with certainty which things would or would not happen.

[roywiggins]

The report's scenario is a photosynthetic mirror bacterium eating the bottom out from under the oceanic food web. The existing predators would not be able to eat them, and so they would grow fast, and their predators would then shrink in population and that interaction would ripple upwards sending marine animals extinct.