You raise important points but some of these issues are less of a concern: -air supply leaks: the whole air supply is inside the shelter with a fan at the inside end. Thus, any leak goes from clean to dirty and is not an issue -leaks through membrane (including airlock doors): not a major issue, the positive pressure will not let anything from the outside come inside -shutdown due to failure of critical components is not foreseen to be an issue - all components should be possible to engineer for long continuous operation
The suits are indeed only 50k protection factor but it should be possible to use proven methods used to transfer germ free mice between facilities.
Water and food are not completely solved yet, agreed. I think food will be the harder part and I'm happy organizations such as ALLFED are working on this.
I am happy to address this in more detail as we have spent quite a bit of time turning many stones. That said, a team of people can still make mistakes so I appreciate that you are helping me looking into this and this is part of the reason I posted - I would love to take a call to if that would be easier to hash this out.
Absolutely, if anything I trust decades of consistent, empirical results way more than something arrived at by armchair mathematics, or even worse, a mixture of intuition and extrapolated theories.
This seems largely correct but I must admit I have never seen an experiment that clearly demonstrates that diffusion is the main feature. Perhaps such experiments have been carried out but if so I think one would have to do something extremely challenging like filming the process at extremely high FPS rates with something like a scanning electron microscope. My sense is that the "performance curve" of filters is mostly empirically deduced while we are actually only extrapolating when making statements about what exactly causes these empirical results.
For example, another process I intuitively feel is different between air and water is the density and thus the force of the fluid on contaminants. If you travel in a boat, it is so much harder to stick your hand in the water compared to the air. Similarly, a particle that could potentially attach to a filter fiber in water is unlikely to stay attached as the water would exceed such a high force on it that it detaches. This is why one washes one's car with a water hose, not an air hose.
I would be interested in any experiment that has looked at the micro scale physics involved in air filtration but my impression after looking at a lot of filter literature is that there are few, if any such studies.
I agree about it being hard to understand the immune system completely, i should have written "understand one single process well enough to have high confidence". So i just wanted to understand one step, such as the binding of something to just one of the TLRs. And the understanding could be empirical too - I would be confident if researchers could robustly repeat a failure of some mirror component to bind to a TLR, for example.
I was unaware that filters have to be designed differently for viruses. Would you be able to point to where I can read about that? You are the second person I have encountered that has said something along the lines of "filters might work differently for viruses". I have, as you might see from my post, looked quite deeply into filters and they are tested with both liquids and solids of various forms and this heterogeneity in challenge aerosols, from what I have read, hardly seems to affect their efficiency.
To both of you: My knowledge of microbiology and biochemistry is almost non-existent. So I actually very much welcome pushback on the threat itself. I also feel that I should grasp the science behind mirror bacteria at least on some very preliminary level. That said, I always want to understand things "completely" so I started looking for specific places in the immune system where reversed chirality would mess things up and started with the TLR4 receptor and could not conclude that well that chirality would play a role for 2 reasons:
1 - It seems the TLR4 could bind to quite a variety of "form factors" so it is unclear why it would be much less effective for mirror pathogens
2 - I then looked at TLR2 and am hoping to learn from someone expert in this why the binding of NAM (I hope I got that right) and the attached lipid is likely to fail with mirror bacteria. This avenue of study led me to discover 2 things that some bacteria actually uses reverse chirality amino acids in their cell walls exactly to be resistant to degradation, and, that the TLR structures seem to actually flex in space, meaning they have at least some flexibility in the spatial arrangement of whatever they seek to recognize.
The evidence I am now chasing is somewhere scientists actually swapped some lipid or sugar for its mirror equivalent and then looked at the resulting binding or failure to bind to e.g. a TLR.
That said, there is a lot of intellectual power behind that report and it has been peer reviewed so I would be surprised if I find something that invalidates it. And I think the main message is that "we don't know, but it does not look promising" and the authors state that they would love for people to engage with their assertions.
Hi, that is an excellent question! First, is there a place in my post that I indicate it is more threatening?
Second, and to answer your question: I actually have not spent much time thinking about the relative risk from various types of biological catastrophes. Kevin Esvelt have previously drawn up 2 different categories of bio catastrophes he calls Wildfire (fast spreading) and Stealth (pre- or a-symptomatic spread). In his last paper I think he put numbers on it. I have seen no numbers on risks from mirror bio, but comment from a while ago on Metaculus does mention it and the subsequent forecast was high. Then there might also be scenarios we do not know about yet - it seems engineering biology could open several, weird ways things could go wrong.
Also, you are completely right that there is no imminent urgency - it would take time to developed the required science and infrastructure to enable dangerous mirror bio to be developed. However, I was encouraged to start work on defenses already as a proper resilience response would have to involve governments that are known to sometimes take a lot of time to consider action. Also, if small-scale work can be done on testing and improving the shelters, we would be in a much better position if the future does not go as we hope. Does that make sense? On the timing of this intervention, I am actually quite unsure so if you or someone else see some significant challenges here I would be keen to hear other perspectives. Lastly, this area is laden with infohazards so there is likely to be significant knowledge that most of the public does not have access to, but that might motivate certain decision makers to move at what seems like arbitrary times.
As I tried highlighting in the post, the reason I worked on this particular intervention was more about my skillset. To defend against Wildfire you would mainly rely on PPE and the Stealth you would have to rely much more on early detection such as the Nucleic Acid Observatory's work. Thankfully work is well underway to build resilience against these two other types of biological threats.
Please let me know if this did not fully address your question? Thanks for engaging with this!
Thanks again for a super thoughtful response and for the offer to help. How would you prefer to collaborate going forward? I am happy to do so here in LW comments in case perhaps others find it helpful but would also be happy to do so on Reddit ,offline, etc. until we think we have something worth publishing - good point on half baked prepper ideas potentially being net negative.
people who have already identified a scenario that they find compelling
That's a super good point, my and my network's expertise lies more in bio risks (and to the degree these overlap with AI scenarios). Perhaps it is better to start with bio - it also seems easier to tackle as many people seem to think AI is kind of binary (as in either everyone dies or most people survive) and also much harder to prepare for. Then, if that somehow becomes successful, we can later on consider venturing out with advice for prepping for other scenarios (e.g. if AI destroys most democracies and people could need plans for escaping to the last liberal democracies standing or building a new one).
Hi and thanks for your thoughtful reply and especially your hint at potentially being willing to help out.
To your first question on existing guides I am criticizing, I would a bit hand wavily say "all the usual ones". I have gone through quite a few preparedness lists online from the preparedness community not affiliated with national governments ("preppers") and have never seen any hint of why they suggest preparing the way they suggest. I have also looked at preparedness advice by the Scandinavian governments, and I think the some US ones as well and again, have not found any evidence of why they suggest what they suggest. So my first criticism is that it is unclear what is being prepared for. I have a suspicion based on some BOTECs that if one starts with lying out the threat landscape and try to translate the various threat categories into personal risk (chance of a "civilian" dying from various causes), it would lead to a different set of recommendations than those offered by either preppers or governments.
I like your segmentation. At first I was thinking the do not know/care but happen to prepare was highly unlikely. But then after reading about historical disasters one group stood out: Rich people, perhaps with an entrepreneurial and action-oriented attitude, seem to often do well. To be honest I have not given this much thought but perhaps I should. Instead, I have thought "this should probably exist so I want to see if others want me to work on it before putting in potentially a lot of work". I thought I would check here with the rationalist community first, as I thought it might appeal to a subsection of rationalists (does not look like that from the reception of this post), so perhaps I will rewrite this to appeal to preppers - perhaps I should instead target existing preppers with a propensity for logical arguments (not sure if it is logical to prepare - it might be more cost effective in terms of life expectancy to go for a run and/or use money on vegetables!).
Having thought about this only briefly I see another segmentation for potential users of such a guide:
I think the ideal here would be the quadrant that has both, while either convincing non-prepper rationalists, or irrational preppers to become interested in the guide is probably an uphill battle. I have worked for a few months on biosecurity and some people in this "industry" are genuinely worried about themselves and their loved ones to the point where they would be willing to at least make some small investments (whether skills or products) in preparing for a catastrophic pandemic. I was thinking, perhaps naively, that this might happen with certain people in AI too (although AI is probably much harder to prepare for). So I guess their top complaint is that there is really nothing out there to help them prepare for what they think might be one of the most likely way they or their loved ones could die. I am personally also following government advice, and I am a bit surprised that stockpiling does not include even basic pandemic PPE - many governments themselves are stockpiling PPE, so why not encourage citizens to do the same? Some governments even reduced their stockpiles of PPE but purely due to cost saving and not due to perceived lower risks (instead they should have tried to shift the responsibility to the citizens, encouraging them to stockpile this privately).
Really good point on a flow-chart instead of a recipe: If I start compiling a guide I am likely to take up your advice on this!
Again thanks a lot for comments and especially your kind offer to potentially help out! I think I will next try to gauge interest from preppers instead or rationalists by e.g. making a guest blog post on some prepper blog - the response here on LW seems like there might not be much interest in personal preparedness (or I have done a botch job of my first LW post - many LW posts on prepping are quite popular!).
Just a note that I intend to answer this comment, but it might be a couple of days.