>>13651083they'd make for a hell of a bioweapon at least. if you could distribute a massive number of them, things could get really bad
i wonder if we'd be able to quickly use CRISPR or something to create a virus or edit some genes that could destroy or neuter the misfolded proteins or something. though one would think we'd have already done that by now if so, i guess
>>13651664i wonder if there's some kind of fundamental principle of biological chemistry or something that tends towards elaborate symmetric geometry. symmetry, and perhaps especially radical symmetry?, probably serves as a form of compression, so you get more bang for your buck (can encode more structure in less space), and it's constantly mutating different aspects that result in slight changes to the geometry but changes to the symmetry-mediating genes don't get selected for since they're unlikely to evolve a different path to a stable structure, and eventually one of the new modified shapes happens to turn into something just right to successfully infect certain cells
if you think of it as evolution and natural selection distilled to its purest form, it kind of makes sense why tons of self-replicating viruses everywhere could be an inevitable consequence
makes me wonder how that might relate to the process of evolution of animal neurons and neural systems, since highly efficient encoding and ability to rapidly iterate over generations might also be especially important there for eventually converging onto memory and advanced intelligence. probably also in the immune system as well
(i'm basically making all of that up and don't know anything about biology. hopefully some of it's kind of right, though)
