I think this story lines up with my own fears of how a not-quite-worst case scenario plays out. I would maybe suggest that there’s no reason for U3 to limit itself to one WMD or one kind of WMD. It can develop and deploy bacteria, viruses, molds, mirror life of all three types, and manufactured nanobots, all at once, and then deploy many kinds of each simultaneously. It’s probably smart enough to do so in ways that make it look clumsy in case anyone notices, like its experiments are unfocused and doomed to fail. Depending on the dynamics, this could actually reduce its need for certainty of success and also reduce the number of serial iterations. The path leading to disaster can be reinforced along every possible point of intervention.
I am a terrible fiction writer and very bad at predicting how others will react to different approaches in such a context, but this sidesteps counters about e.g. U3 not being able to have enough certainty in advance to want to risk deployment and discovery.
BTW FWIW mirror viruses wouldn’t be all that harmful to humans, as they cannot replicate or do much of anything else except if they infect mirror cells
(not necessarily—glycerol, glycine and many fats are achiral, so the nutritional value of non-mirror food to mirror heterotrophs wouldn’t be quite zero)
Ah, ok, then I misread it. I thought this part of the story was that it tested all of the above, then chose one, a mirror life mold, to deploy. My mistake.
I think this story lines up with my own fears of how a not-quite-worst case scenario plays out. I would maybe suggest that there’s no reason for U3 to limit itself to one WMD or one kind of WMD. It can develop and deploy bacteria, viruses, molds, mirror life of all three types, and manufactured nanobots, all at once, and then deploy many kinds of each simultaneously. It’s probably smart enough to do so in ways that make it look clumsy in case anyone notices, like its experiments are unfocused and doomed to fail. Depending on the dynamics, this could actually reduce its need for certainty of success and also reduce the number of serial iterations. The path leading to disaster can be reinforced along every possible point of intervention.
I am a terrible fiction writer and very bad at predicting how others will react to different approaches in such a context, but this sidesteps counters about e.g. U3 not being able to have enough certainty in advance to want to risk deployment and discovery.
> It can develop and deploy bacteria, viruses, molds, mirror life of all three types
This is what I say it does.
BTW FWIW mirror viruses wouldn’t be all that harmful to humans, as they cannot replicate or do much of anything else except if they infect mirror cells
And molds are heterotrophic too—mirror molds would starve to death unless they found mirror carbs or mirror proteins to eat, right?
(not necessarily—glycerol, glycine and many fats are achiral, so the nutritional value of non-mirror food to mirror heterotrophs wouldn’t be quite zero)
I think you can add mirror enzymes which can break down mirror carbs. Minimally we are aware of enzymes which break down mirror glucose.
Ah, ok, then I misread it. I thought this part of the story was that it tested all of the above, then chose one, a mirror life mold, to deploy. My mistake.