Inspired by some awesome comments in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33453037
Great short story. Reminds me of something I would find in on of the collections of short stories le Guin or Vonnegut would show up on as a second or third editor.
Nice!
Apparently one organism can use L-glucose, Pseudomonas caryophylli [0]. It's a plant pathogen [1]. No doubt other micro-organisms can as well. So would be a great reset of evolution back to the Cambrian era?
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40609/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burkholderia_caryophylli
Edit: following this "great chiral collapse", the new evolution is multi-chiral providing a vastly greater range of protein structures, biochemical reactions, etc, etc...
Fun quick read. Scary part to me is that this seems like something that could actually happen pretty easily.
Reading material can't be a Show HN, so I've taken that out of the title.
Nice prose, good explanations.
A little digression can be interesting.
I wonder about the plot: why not create the other bug, that converts glucose back? Then it'd reach an equilibrium.
Nice concept. I really liked the beginning, but it comes a bit unglued at the end, too much explaining and not enough showing.
For a similar, grim, and much longer SF story see the Rifters trilogy by Peter Watts:
https://www.tor.com/2012/08/14/psychopaths-at-the-bottom-of-...
Spoiler: a biologically incompatible branch of life discovered in the deep ocean starts to outcompete everything on land once it's brought to the surface, leading to catastrophic breakdown of civilization.
"Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts." — James Nicoll
Awesome read! You should write on Storylocks :)
Why would L-glucose taste the same and have the same effects on mood, etc. if nothing in nature could interact with it? I am not an expert in chemistry or molecular biology, but that seems odd.