Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
Speaker 2: my name is Nolan.
Speaker 3: They called me Bed. We're joined as always with our
Speaker 3: super producer Paul Mission Control Decant. Most importantly, you are you.
Speaker 3: You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't
Speaker 3: want you to know. When there's something strange in the
Speaker 3: space station, you gotta blame space fungus, Paul, Can I
Speaker 3: get at like a weird siren and then like an
Speaker 3: astronaut like whatever an emergency signal is on the ISS flusters?
Speaker 4: Themes sound alike that we won't get sued for by
Speaker 4: Huey Lewis and the news proposo, how dare you?
Speaker 2: How dare you invoke poposo?
Speaker 3: We defer to you, Paul, because you're the best in
Speaker 3: the business at this. That's right, folks. After years of
Speaker 3: speculating on space travel and mushroom aliens a la Lovecraft,
Speaker 3: we're finally diving into the topic of fungus in space.
Speaker 3: And forgive us for saying it it's literally out of
Speaker 3: this world. Hashtag no pun left behind. Here are the facts.
Speaker 5: Fungus is amazing. Mm hmm, dare we say fantastic.
Speaker 4: If you want to find out some more outside of
Speaker 4: this episode, we highly recommend the documentary Fantastic Fungi, which
Speaker 4: goes through a lot of the things that make these
Speaker 4: creatures organisms, weird, sentient beings, very special and confusing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and confusing, speaking and confusing. Let's have some fun
Speaker 3: with this one. We were talking a little bit off air.
Speaker 3: Is it fungi? Is it fung guy? Is fungi or fungi?
Speaker 3: I suggest, respectfully that we use all of them interchangeably,
Speaker 3: just to stick it to the mycologist in the crowd.
Speaker 4: While there aren't necessarily this many pronunciations of what these
Speaker 4: things are, there are one hundred and forty four thousand
Speaker 4: different species of them, and that includes you know, sort
Speaker 4: of cousins like yeasts, rusts. I'm sorry, Ben smuts smuts, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: like like dirty mags.
Speaker 5: What are we talking here?
Speaker 3: That's anthropomorphizing, that's like the human term. Yeah, fung gui, fungi.
Speaker 3: There are a lot of fungal things. They include mildew's molds,
Speaker 3: rust yeast, and of course, most famously the Kobe Bryant
Speaker 3: and the gang mushrooms. And the weird thing is, we
Speaker 3: know for sure that there are many, many more species
Speaker 3: in this kingdom that science has yet to discover. Some
Speaker 3: might not even be from Earth spoiler, Some are definitely
Speaker 3: not from Earth. We also know there are many fungus
Speaker 3: like organisms. Biologically they're kissing cousins, things like slime molds
Speaker 3: or which we'll talk about they're quite intelligent, or water molds.
Speaker 3: Fancy game for those is ooh, my sakes.
Speaker 2: And I guess if.
Speaker 4: My say too, that sounds like a thing you'd say
Speaker 4: when you're excited, don't This isn't something of these these
Speaker 4: things have in common kind of the way they proliferate,
Speaker 4: like using spores.
Speaker 5: And the like. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they reproduce differently from the fauna of Earth in
Speaker 3: that they they shoot out spores, and these spores evolved
Speaker 3: to function, at least the ones we know about, they
Speaker 3: evolvet to function in Earth's gravity, which means it's kind
Speaker 3: of like you shoot an arrow into the air and
Speaker 3: you're not sure where it lands, but you know it
Speaker 3: will fly in something like an arc unless it picks
Speaker 3: up a wind pattern, and true story, some creatures or
Speaker 3: entities in this kingdom of fungus, they have evolved to
Speaker 3: propagate towards certain wind patterns, which is cartoonishly specific of them.
Speaker 3: But that's not even the beginning of how specific these
Speaker 3: these little guys get. I mean, they're mysterious, and it's
Speaker 3: weird that they're still so mysterious, right because fungi, these
Speaker 3: fun guys are some of the most widely distributed life
Speaker 3: forms on Earth. To your point zero, that sporing reproduction
Speaker 3: works very well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, and when those spores get shot out, sometimes
Speaker 2: if they land on like a surface like soil, like
Speaker 2: the ground, they proliferate best. Some if they land in water,
Speaker 2: they like to live there and they grow the best.
Speaker 2: Some grow on your walls, man, behind your walls, And
Speaker 2: those are.
Speaker 5: The ones you got to be scared about.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, if you're any any homeowners out there,
Speaker 4: I just heard you know, black mold in this voice
Speaker 4: screaming in the back of their minds. That requires serious mitigation.
Speaker 4: It can mess up your property value first off, but
Speaker 4: it can also like you literally kill your family slowly,
Speaker 4: you know, over time by ingesting and inhaling these these molds.
Speaker 3: And yeah, like mesolothemioma, it's or as best dis exposure consequences,
Speaker 3: it's something you might not notice for years or decades.
Speaker 2: Very silent killer exactly. And the important thing to note
Speaker 2: there is that moisture is often one of the major
Speaker 2: factors when it comes to the way these things grow
Speaker 2: and how well they grow, whether it's in soil or
Speaker 2: just you know, in a body of water or something
Speaker 2: like that.
Speaker 4: Good de humidifier and avestment is worth its weight in gold.
Speaker 3: I'm just laughing because to that point, Matt, I'm picturing
Speaker 3: whomever is this week the world's most evil billionaire talking
Speaker 3: to some species of fungus and saying YouTube Rick biomoistia,
Speaker 3: We're not so different you and I. You know, still
Speaker 3: my favorite villain life. We're not so different you and I.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I do love that line. Well, and it's
Speaker 2: just so true because in the end, right, everybody's got
Speaker 2: that greater good they're fighting for, even fungus.
Speaker 5: Yeah, fungus is.
Speaker 3: The protagonist of its own story, dude.
Speaker 2: Well, because some fungus is great and is actually beneficial
Speaker 2: for other plant in animal life. Other fungus, though, is
Speaker 2: just out for its own thing.
Speaker 3: Shout out Last of Us, shout out Cortis EPs.
Speaker 5: Yeah, fruiting, fruiting bodies.
Speaker 3: Right, parasitic right. We did an episode and video back
Speaker 3: before we went to audio podcast. We talked a bit
Speaker 3: you think about the the incredible subgenre of fungus. I'm
Speaker 3: not saying, I'm not using the crrect taxonomy, but there
Speaker 3: are not like Last of Us. For anyone who doesn't know,
Speaker 3: does not come from a vacuum, there are parasitic life
Speaker 3: forms that alter the behavior of their prey and they
Speaker 3: make them do crazy, crazy things. Now it's not just
Speaker 3: related to or it's not just restricted the fungus, but
Speaker 3: you have to know these things are much more animate
Speaker 3: than they may appear. If you and your hippie friends
Speaker 3: are out foraging in the woods.
Speaker 4: Well yeah, even in the way they like communicate with
Speaker 4: each other through practically neural networks. We'll get to that
Speaker 4: one percent, But you know, the question then become maybe
Speaker 4: we lead with what exactly is a mushroom?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 4: We know, I mean, I'm surprised there hasn't been more
Speaker 4: of a mushroom lobby to like encourage the edible types
Speaker 4: like the incredible edible egg. But the fact of the matter,
Speaker 4: it is not all mushrooms are created equal. Some of
Speaker 4: them are delicious when sauted with butter, and some of
Speaker 4: them will kill you. As we know from that story
Speaker 4: out of Australia that Matt brought to us about the
Speaker 4: woman that I believe made some sort of beef Wellington
Speaker 4: out of what was it, deaf cap mushrooms, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Which probably came over to Australia and the pine trees. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean, it's a weird, weird story. And this is not,
Speaker 3: by the way, the first person to allegedly commit homicide
Speaker 3: in this fashion. Tale as old as time, and I
Speaker 3: think that's a great question to start with. What are mushrooms?
Speaker 3: Most of us, if we're not mycologists, even if we're
Speaker 3: very good at identifying mushrooms in the wild, you might
Speaker 3: often think that what you are seeing is the entire organism.
Speaker 3: It's not. You're sort of just seeing like it's dick
Speaker 3: and balls, Because, yeah, the mushroom that you see in
Speaker 3: the air, right above the surface or on the surface
Speaker 3: of something is the fruit of a much lef larger
Speaker 3: organism living underground. They're the reproductive organs of a much
Speaker 3: larger creature.
Speaker 5: So let's just get it out of the way. I mean,
Speaker 5: you know, the mushroom tip that you.
Speaker 4: See does quite result even think about human.
Speaker 2: You know, phallus.
Speaker 5: I mean, I guess it just does, you know.
Speaker 3: So I guess you're right. The real life form is
Speaker 3: a network of microscopic filaments things you can you might not.
Speaker 3: You can't see the entirety of it with the human eye.
Speaker 3: They're called Hyphi h y p h A.
Speaker 2: Not to be.
Speaker 4: Confused with the hip hop craze of the early two thousands.
Speaker 4: Remember Hyphie like vans like got my vans on, but
Speaker 4: they look like sneakers, the Wolfgang and like early Little
Speaker 4: b That was the Hyphi rap movement.
Speaker 3: So these colonies, these my celia, they spread out in
Speaker 3: three dimensions through the undersurface, if we want to on
Speaker 3: D and D about it, the under dark, when a
Speaker 3: sound balder's gate. And they are essentially always at a buffet.
Speaker 3: They are not discriminatory. They will feed on basically everything roots, wood,
Speaker 3: and yes, the bodies of the dead.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they form networks. Okay, so like as one
Speaker 2: let's say one of these series, right, one of these
Speaker 2: colonies imagine it forty feet from where you are right now,
Speaker 2: and then there's another one where you are, and then
Speaker 2: as those things spread out, they connect together.
Speaker 4: This is something that's really beautifully i guess dramatized for
Speaker 4: lack of a better term. In Fantastic Fungi, they have
Speaker 4: these sort of cgi kind of recreations of what it
Speaker 4: would look like if you sort of animated the way
Speaker 4: signals kind of bounce around in these networks, and they're
Speaker 4: they're sort of, like I guess, animated using sort of
Speaker 4: beads of light kind of dancing around between these points,
Speaker 4: and like said Bennetts, it is a three dimensional network
Speaker 4: that goes a lot farther than you might think. And
Speaker 4: we'll get into what that actually, you know, means in
Speaker 4: a little bit. But really really cool images in that film.
Speaker 4: Oh also, just last thing, if if anybody is into
Speaker 4: just trippy imagery, there's nothing cooler than watching mushrooms grow
Speaker 4: in time lapse. It is so cool and it really
Speaker 4: points to kind of how alien and mutant some of
Speaker 4: these things really seem like. And there's tone of that
Speaker 4: in the Fantastic Fungi documentary.
Speaker 3: I've never said no to a time lapse and I'm
Speaker 3: not about to start saying that now. I'll also one
Speaker 3: way to understand it, folks, if you have studied termite colonies,
Speaker 3: termite hives, then maybe the best way to put it
Speaker 3: is through comparison. Termite hives are like duplow constructions, and
Speaker 3: these fungal networks are like the lego or technique for
Speaker 3: the nerds in the crowd, right, welcome.
Speaker 2: Correctly technechnic.
Speaker 3: Okay, all right, we're fun guys. So there's also, uh,
Speaker 3: there's also a common misconception I think a lot of
Speaker 3: people have, which is we think of mushrooms as plants.
Speaker 3: We think of fungus as a plant life form. It
Speaker 3: is not. They are actually more closely related to animals
Speaker 3: in that they breathe oxygen, they excel carbon dioxide, and
Speaker 3: they cannot contain chlorophyll or they don't for the most part.
Speaker 4: They literally have gills, really, you know, oh yeah, underneath
Speaker 4: the mushroom, the tip the head, there's there's these things
Speaker 4: that are officially called gills.
Speaker 3: But not not not for water. But now exactly, like I'm.
Speaker 4: Just saying, almost, there is a certain part of the
Speaker 4: nomenclature of mushrooms. It feels more like describing human or
Speaker 4: animal biology, you know, physiology that it does like describing
Speaker 4: plant life.
Speaker 3: Again Lovecraft in Yeah, so these weird mixtapes of superpowers.
Speaker 3: According to some more out there researchers, like the late
Speaker 3: and controversial ethnobiologist Terence McKenna and philosopher I would argue,
Speaker 3: they'll even suggest that certain mushrooms are responsible for the
Speaker 3: evolution of human intelligence as we know it, getting human
Speaker 3: civilization across the gap of the bicameral mind, even leading
Speaker 3: to the creation or discovery if you like, of religion.
Speaker 3: And it's no secret that mushrooms and other fungi are
Speaker 3: often associated with witchcraft and anywhere you go in the world,
Speaker 3: these entities have existed in step with the primates that
Speaker 3: later became humans. As a result, there are tons and
Speaker 3: tons of folklore involving mushrooms, often in a sinister or
Speaker 3: epiphantic or like revelatory sort of way.
Speaker 2: Yes, and if you're super interested in that concept of
Speaker 2: mushrooms potentially having an effect on the evolution of humans
Speaker 2: right and our intelligence, do check out our episode from
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen. It's called Psilocybin, Fact, Fiction and Future with
Speaker 2: Robert Lamb it's a great conversation.
Speaker 3: Oh beautiful. Yeah, and check out stuff to blow your
Speaker 3: mind with our pals Rob and Joe and so Joe also,
Speaker 3: of course famously we say it several times a year.
Speaker 3: Joe Joe let us down quite the rabbit hole with
Speaker 3: the bi caramel mind episode and so like. Okay, German
Speaker 3: folklore which is dance inside fairy rings. Fairy rings are
Speaker 3: formed by mushrooms. French fables will warn anybody against stepping
Speaker 3: into these fairy rings, which are sometimes in France called
Speaker 3: source of his rings, and they say, if you do,
Speaker 3: you'll get cursed by a specific kind of toad, a
Speaker 3: toad that seems haunted. A toad that has bulging eyes.
Speaker 4: Did you put this in here for me, my my
Speaker 4: young gumm and boy heritage?
Speaker 3: I did. I did. That's why I put the German
Speaker 3: folklore there.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 5: I appreciate that.
Speaker 2: What is this? What's this toad gonna do to you?
Speaker 2: Hop around near you and just look at you.
Speaker 5: Bulge at you man, those eyes.
Speaker 2: I'll just give you the evil eye.
Speaker 5: Huey Lewis will be coming for you, buddy, before you know.
Speaker 5: You know what.
Speaker 4: Else though, it's something that you see a lot in
Speaker 4: kind of psychedelic fiction, like Alice in Wonderland, Alice eats
Speaker 4: the part of the different mushrooms, you know, to become
Speaker 4: big and small and all of that, and the hookah
Speaker 4: smoking caterpillar, you know, as described by Jefferson airplane, is
Speaker 4: sitting on giant mushrooms.
Speaker 3: And interestingly enough, in most obviously right, we're all making
Speaker 3: the connection the idea of a toad with bulging eyes
Speaker 3: had it been infected by a certain type of fungus
Speaker 3: that was changing its behavior. There there may be some
Speaker 3: sand to that, but in the bulk of Western folklore,
Speaker 3: at least uh these things are seen as magical objects,
Speaker 3: or they're seen as perhaps a symbolic gateway to a
Speaker 3: greater realization. They're not seeing as entities with agency. And
Speaker 3: that's fascinating because one of the hottest debates in recent
Speaker 3: decades concerns the idea of kid you not conspiracy, realist
Speaker 3: fungal intelligence, which sounds super hp Lovecraft. It's about to
Speaker 3: get even more Lovecraft, by the way, but legitimate scientists
Speaker 3: are making this argument. We picked one that we've got
Speaker 3: to mention just because his name is Amazing. Professor biology
Speaker 3: at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I know his name
Speaker 3: is Nicholas P. Money.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it was really quickly to the Lovecraft reference.
Speaker 5: Just I know most people are familiar, but.
Speaker 4: I think one thing that evokes this for me is
Speaker 4: that a lot of the deities of Lovecraft stories are
Speaker 4: these kind of ancient earth spirits or from the depths
Speaker 4: of the sea, or in some way from so deep, deep,
Speaker 4: deep down that they're basically in another realm. But I
Speaker 4: picture these things as having like mushrooms growing out of
Speaker 4: their bodies, you know, and so of being like one
Speaker 4: with the roots of the trees, and part of this
Speaker 4: sort of like deeper you know, esoteric knowledge of the
Speaker 4: planet and the universe.
Speaker 3: Oh, we'll get to that part. Well.
Speaker 2: It's kind of weird because the stuff that Nick Money
Speaker 2: is talking about almost lends itself to maybe I'm sorry,
Speaker 2: go ahead please, but it's feeling like maybe there's something
Speaker 2: to it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. And Professor Money first off, also a great name.
Speaker 5: These are for free Nick.
Speaker 3: Professor Money argues for fungal intelligence in terms of operation
Speaker 3: operational capacity, right or capability, which is what we've talked
Speaker 3: about when we talk about how the human species still
Speaker 3: can't defy in intelligence. Fungus can operate as like different
Speaker 3: species of fungus can operate as an individual or as
Speaker 3: a group. It appears to make decisions based on things
Speaker 3: that would increase its likelihood of consuming resources and reproducing.
Speaker 3: It can learn. It has short term memory. That doesn't
Speaker 3: mean it's conscious or sentient, but it does. It does
Speaker 3: make a case that these things are having some sort
Speaker 3: of agency creating or pursuing better environmental situations. Spooky spooky stuff.
Speaker 2: Well, think about short term memory like that means something
Speaker 2: some information is stored somewhere within the network, within the
Speaker 2: single organism or the group of organisms. You cannot have
Speaker 2: short term memory without informa being stored and then accessed. Again,
Speaker 2: that's so intense to me.
Speaker 4: Think of memory in a computer that sort of access
Speaker 4: short term memory, you know, and like hard drive space
Speaker 4: would be maybe the long term memory.
Speaker 5: But the RAM or.
Speaker 4: Whatever it is you know that you're using in whatever
Speaker 4: computer system you have, it is like the stuff that
Speaker 4: is needed for like the short term for the time
Speaker 4: being loaded into that and then moved on.
Speaker 3: And guys, I want to take a quick side note, folks.
Speaker 3: For the last few episodes, you may have heard a
Speaker 3: cat in a background. Unfortunately, I have a cat who
Speaker 3: is not doing very well, so I need to keep
Speaker 3: an eye on him. And Matt Nolan, I want to say,
Speaker 3: I appreciate you guys for tolerating that. So we're going
Speaker 3: to go ahead and get through this episode because I
Speaker 3: think what you bring up there, Noel, the idea of
Speaker 3: the computer analogue is the idea of storage of a
Speaker 3: past situation is indeed fascinating. That is not That is
Speaker 3: not what you think about when you're eating a fantastic
Speaker 3: mushroom pizza, right, That's not what you think about when
Speaker 3: you are, like me, sorry, making a kick ass mushroom case. Ada.
Speaker 3: We also know that things very much like fungus, the
Speaker 3: aforementioned slime molds, they can make incredible logistical decisions that
Speaker 3: rival those of human beings. Perhaps the most i would
Speaker 3: say illustrative experiment involved slime mold that was able to
Speaker 3: generate the most effective and accurate map of the Tokyo
Speaker 3: rail system.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you can find that in an article from Wired
Speaker 4: by Laura Sanders from their science desk. Slime mold grows
Speaker 4: network just like Tokyo rail system. It's got images of
Speaker 4: how long it takes it to form. And once again,
Speaker 4: like if you watch like time lapses of this kind
Speaker 4: of stuff is remarkable because you also might notice that
Speaker 4: if you have like your front yard or whatever, and
Speaker 4: you see a little mushroom and then you have a
Speaker 4: big rain, you might come out like two hours later
Speaker 4: and that thing's doubled in size. So these things grow
Speaker 4: at alarming rates, with the serious complexity to them, and
Speaker 4: because we're not even seeing what's happening behind the scenes
Speaker 4: right underground.
Speaker 3: And again credit to Laura Sanders from January of twenty
Speaker 3: twenty two for that fantastic summation over on Wired on
Speaker 3: the Slime Mold Network. It seems that overall, in exchange
Speaker 3: for not having the superpower of photosynthesis, fungi have gained
Speaker 3: other superpowers, the ability to control other creatures, to live
Speaker 3: with or through them, et cetera, et cetera. Why are
Speaker 3: we telling you all this? First because we think it's
Speaker 3: super interesting. Second because we want to explore a notion
Speaker 3: this evening that haunts just as much as it haunted
Speaker 3: HP Lovecraft in his day. What if the first extraterrestrials
Speaker 3: humans meet aren't animals at all? What if there's some
Speaker 3: sort of mushroom. We're gonna pause for a word from
Speaker 3: our sponsor. Let's all go check on our portabellas and
Speaker 3: we'll be right back. Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 2: Then, I just had a flash of fungus technology, like
Speaker 2: an intelligent fungal species that we encounter that creates its
Speaker 2: own technology. I know that's been portrayed in places, but
Speaker 2: I don't like what just happened inside my brain visual stuff.
Speaker 3: And your brain is really your first spaceship, So hold on.
Speaker 3: I mean, maybe not a mushroom like you do order
Speaker 3: a pizza, but how about a fungus.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, you mentioned mushroom technology. In the realm
Speaker 4: of like cinemon fiction, I think a creator that does
Speaker 4: a great job of depicting this kind of stuff, as
Speaker 4: David Cronenberg, and in movies like Naked Lunch or you know, Videodrome,
Speaker 4: there's a lot of kind of like body horror modification
Speaker 4: kind of stuff that involves these sort of outgrowths, you know,
Speaker 4: that have very mushroom like qualities. Pretty pretty, pretty neat stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so let's stick with fiction here because we owe
Speaker 3: it to the Lovecraft fans, of which I count myself
Speaker 3: in their number in the mythos of HB. Lovecraft, as
Speaker 3: many of us listening tonight doubtlessly know, there is precedent
Speaker 3: for this. The alien race. The Mego m I dash
Speaker 3: Go are a. There are an interstellar capable species of
Speaker 3: things that kind of look like crustaceans but are actually
Speaker 3: fungoid in nature. They're from a planet called Juga or Yuggolf,
Speaker 3: and they get into all sorts of what we can
Speaker 3: just call lovable hygiens the way that Requiem for a
Speaker 3: Dream is a great date night for them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, these are infernal beings, aren't they been there?
Speaker 3: They're ancient aliens, is a go way to describe them.
Speaker 3: And as bizarre as that might sound, it might sound
Speaker 3: like Lovecraft was off off his gourd right out of
Speaker 3: his badger bag on drugs or something. But turns out
Speaker 3: science is proving that these fun guys are actually a
Speaker 3: pretty fantastic candidate for the first aliens that humans meet.
Speaker 3: They're up there with the water bear, the Tartar grade,
Speaker 3: the legend in the game when it comes to outer
Speaker 3: space for survival. They're there may be better than the
Speaker 3: Tartar grade. Honestly, and like human astronauts, some form of
Speaker 3: them is already in space. It's already happening, like that
Speaker 3: ship has sailed, that rocket has launched, mushroom a fungus
Speaker 3: are there are other astronauts that are non human that
Speaker 3: beat you to space. If you're listening tonight.
Speaker 4: Far far more adaptable than you are, right, I mean,
Speaker 4: don't we already have like space mold. That's that's become
Speaker 4: a bit of of an issue for astronauts and the
Speaker 4: International Space Station.
Speaker 3: It's a huge problem. Imagine, I mean, owning a house, right,
Speaker 3: a little spaceship on the space of Earth's surface is
Speaker 3: already pretty stressful.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: You you can't drive to home depot, you know, you
Speaker 3: can't door dash some taco bell or whatever. You're officially
Speaker 3: responsible for your own diarrhea. In space, you can't. You can't.
Speaker 3: You can't do a lot of stuff, and there are
Speaker 3: so many things that could go wrong. Ever since people
Speaker 3: went to space for longer than just like a lost
Speaker 3: cosmonaut Gagarin kind of jaunt there and back. Ever since
Speaker 3: that moment that people spend time in space, mold and
Speaker 3: fungus has been a huge problem. Science Magazine has talked
Speaker 3: about it with the journalist Richard a love it, and
Speaker 3: even now in the International Space Station, one of the
Speaker 3: things they have to constantly battle is mold, specific types
Speaker 3: of mold that are as determined and tenacious as your
Speaker 3: favorite horror movie villain. They're like Jason, They're like Friday
Speaker 3: the thirteenth. They don't stop. They always come back.
Speaker 2: And we'll find out why these things proliferate so much
Speaker 2: better in space than they do even on Earth in
Speaker 2: a moment.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And we have to also say that these issues
Speaker 3: go back much further than they go back much further
Speaker 3: than the ISS, as far back as nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 3: Russians aboard the Mirror Space Station. They were Russian because
Speaker 3: it was a space station. They looked out one of
Speaker 3: their observation ports one time one orbit and they said, hey,
Speaker 3: something's on the window. And they probably checked with ground
Speaker 3: control and they were like, is there's some supposed to
Speaker 3: be something on the window And ground control is like, bro, yet.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean this you know Alien literally, I mean
Speaker 4: you say trudging towards and I'm just picturing you know,
Speaker 4: the first Alien film, you know, or this this unstoppable
Speaker 4: force is you know, you're you're locked up with this
Speaker 4: thing in space and no one can hear you scream.
Speaker 4: But it turns out, you know, the stowaway and this
Speaker 4: situation that was slowly destroying these for all intents and purposes,
Speaker 4: pretty impervious windows made of something called titanium quartz was
Speaker 4: revealed to have been a type of fun guy that
Speaker 4: had stowed away by clinging to the astronauts themselves.
Speaker 2: Think about how horrifying that is. You're stuck in a spaceship.
Speaker 2: If anything breached into the outside of that spaceship, you're gone.
Speaker 2: Everybody's gone. Nothing you can do about it, Bye bye e.
Speaker 2: And this fungus is just sitting there hanging out on
Speaker 2: your windows.
Speaker 3: Eating them. It's coming in and from the inside. This
Speaker 3: happened multiple times on the Mirror space station alone. There
Speaker 3: is an infamous story from nineteen ninety seven on Mirror
Speaker 3: because they were never able to fix this problem nor
Speaker 3: really get their heads around it. And it's something we're
Speaker 3: talking about off air. Let's go cinematic with it. Let's
Speaker 3: go to the astronaut David Wolf. No, no, we don't
Speaker 3: know if he's a relation to Dick Wolf. But one
Speaker 3: day this astronaut is a board Mirror and he opens
Speaker 3: a service panel, a little maintenance panel, and inside he
Speaker 3: finds not just the mechanisms who was looking for, but
Speaker 3: large condensate globs bowling ball size, beach ball size, big
Speaker 3: big boys.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 2: Think about that. The globs of water that on mirror
Speaker 2: in their what they don't call it a non gravity
Speaker 2: of situation, it's a very low, very very low gravity situation.
Speaker 2: Balls of water that's got stuff in and inside the ball,
Speaker 2: and on the surface.
Speaker 4: Of that ball, gooey, slimy ice, cold orbs of stagnant
Speaker 4: water that were just absolutely swarming, teeming with dozens of
Speaker 4: species of bacteria and fungi. And of course they weren't
Speaker 4: just stagnant themselves just by pemale of stagnant water. They
Speaker 4: were already beginning to colonize and expand and move out
Speaker 4: in this low gravity environment into the Why the electrical
Speaker 4: systems of the plane talk about moisture on Earth is terrifying,
Speaker 4: you know, but you can usually mitigate it with like
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, I'm an evangelist for dehumidifiers. But in space,
Speaker 4: where this stuff is just going everywhere, are getting into stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So it's occluded, right, which means you can see
Speaker 3: kind of through the water, but you can see the
Speaker 3: things moving within, which is even creepier. And let's say
Speaker 3: talisized colonizing, because that goes back to the idea of agency. Right,
Speaker 3: are they deciding to do a thing, you know, or
Speaker 3: are they just fun guys fung guying It's it doesn't
Speaker 3: It doesn't matter philosophically for Wolf though, because he's got
Speaker 3: to like figure out how to stay alive untill he
Speaker 3: can get back to Earth.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I keep imagining the moment of beholding it
Speaker 2: for the first time, pulling away that panel and seeing
Speaker 2: what looks like probably a creature of some sort, right,
Speaker 2: I mean, it probably looks like a living, breathing creature
Speaker 2: that is, you know, moving in the way it's floating there.
Speaker 3: I hope it has I hope it has a funny voice.
Speaker 3: It'd be awesome if it was like love it the wiry.
Speaker 5: Jeez. It's terrifying.
Speaker 3: So it adapted. It didn't just adapt to the inner
Speaker 3: environment of space space station, but it adapted to the
Speaker 3: outer environment. It survived. It thrived on windows, control panels,
Speaker 3: air conditioners, cable insulators. You know, if you have ever
Speaker 3: you know, had to mitigate black mold in a house
Speaker 3: or a domicile here on Earth. You know that it
Speaker 3: just does. It doesn't just go away, it doesn't move on.
Speaker 3: You have to intervene.
Speaker 2: But again, anything that could potentially form condensation within the
Speaker 2: environment of the space station, right, that's what we're talking about,
Speaker 2: because it's that water. It's that all beautiful, precious holy
Speaker 2: water that allows these things to generate.
Speaker 3: We both have moisture. We're not so different to you
Speaker 3: and I, Oh, there it is.
Speaker 4: And it just points out too that like in this situation,
Speaker 4: like is the mold, is the funguy the villain or
Speaker 4: just the hero in its own story? And like we're
Speaker 4: kind of irrelevant in the exchange, you know what I
Speaker 4: mean as far as it's concerned.
Speaker 3: Non fungal life forms are vectors. There are another part
Speaker 3: of an environment to the thing, and every living thing
Speaker 3: is the protagonist of its own story. At this point,
Speaker 3: we can't blame anybody for saying, dang, this is the
Speaker 3: perfect setup from an ex sci fi horror novel. Thanks guys.
Speaker 3: But in the real world where the real orbit around it,
Speaker 3: scientists are not scared. They're very excited about the implications
Speaker 3: of life. That seems, weirdly enough, pretty great at this
Speaker 3: whole space thing and that let's get to that thing
Speaker 3: you foreshadowed so beautifully. They're thriving because they're able unlike humans,
Speaker 3: they're able to reproduce in space.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it turns out the low gravity situation really works
Speaker 2: out when the way you reproduce is to shoot spores
Speaker 2: out from your person or your fun guy. Because in
Speaker 2: the low gravity it's you get a three sixty shot basically,
Speaker 2: especially if you're floating right when you're beginning to reproduce.
Speaker 2: It's kind of nice, kind of works great because you
Speaker 2: can shoot those spores clear across right to the other side,
Speaker 2: maybe even fill an entire space or room with your spores.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's nuts too because they since they don't have gravity.
Speaker 3: It's like when you see fire and lower gravity or
Speaker 3: a lack of gravity, or when you see do you
Speaker 3: guys watch those videos of astronauts talking to kids or
Speaker 3: talking to news organizations and they have different foods that
Speaker 3: are floated around, Like, that's what those spores are doing,
Speaker 3: and they to your point, Matt, they have nothing to
Speaker 3: stop them from expanding. Also, I think people still don't
Speaker 3: understand how space borne fungal species are able to be
Speaker 3: dormant until the perfect time. Somehow they know when to
Speaker 3: activate and begin sporing. And I would imagine, again we're
Speaker 3: not mycologist, but I would imagine that's somehow based on
Speaker 3: perception of water or access to moisture or sensing food.
Speaker 4: I don't know, so, you know, I think we've sort
Speaker 4: of made this point a couple of times. This stuff
Speaker 4: is just incredibly adaptable, and as you mentioned, they are
Speaker 4: able to reproduce out there. They've seem to have an
Speaker 4: evolutionary leg up on human beings from the jump, wouldn't you,
Speaker 4: guys say?
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, at least in this environment. Yet, it
Speaker 3: seems some of the stuff they evolved on Earth has
Speaker 3: benefited them and they have powers that humans don't. And
Speaker 3: scientists also have concluded that they need to study fungal
Speaker 3: growth and behavior in microgravity, especially to your point about adaptation,
Speaker 3: all that ability to repair DNA damage from radiation, Like,
Speaker 3: what if you could somehow adapt that to humans. I
Speaker 3: don't know how you would begin to do that, but
Speaker 3: what if you could make the homo fungoid. Homo fungi insists.
Speaker 2: With Crisper, one can do anything.
Speaker 4: David Cronenberg, He's got the imagination for let's put him
Speaker 4: in charge. No, it's true, and it really does make
Speaker 4: you when you zoom back out and think about like
Speaker 4: our place in the universe, and you know, our attempts
Speaker 4: to push out word into the deeper into the universe,
Speaker 4: and how much better suited fungui are for that journey.
Speaker 4: It really makes you kind of question, like, did they
Speaker 4: come from there in the first place?
Speaker 3: Deep water, my friend, deep water. And it's startling knowing
Speaker 3: all this, knowing that the world old's top scientists, we're
Speaker 3: aware that fungus was awesome in space. Nobody launched any
Speaker 3: of this into space on purpose until twenty sixteen, which
Speaker 3: is kind of recent, right.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, well, as we know time is accelerating, everybody
Speaker 2: we know this, twenty sixteen feels like it was a
Speaker 2: couple weeks ago. Nope, No, but why did they do that,
Speaker 2: Like why would they wait until twenty sixteen to really
Speaker 2: try and study this stuff? For my money, I would
Speaker 2: say it's probably because you don't want too much proliferation
Speaker 2: of fungus right on a spacecraft, so you got to
Speaker 2: make sure you can control it, at least to some extent.
Speaker 2: And they were probably figuring out the technology like to
Speaker 2: control it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that makes sense, because your first priority is going
Speaker 3: to be to save the shuttle or the station and the.
Speaker 2: SA save the mission, save the mission.
Speaker 5: And there we go.
Speaker 3: It's bigger than all of us. And so yeah, that's
Speaker 3: a great point, man, because naturally it means that research
Speaker 3: is going to focus on the best cleaning method, the
Speaker 3: best sanitation method, et cetera, et cetera. And by the way,
Speaker 3: long story short, that stuff worked, but they were never
Speaker 3: able to get to one hundred percent success with it.
Speaker 3: And then they began to look at the problem in
Speaker 3: a different way, from a different angle, and they said,
Speaker 3: we can perhaps learn from these tiny boys. And at
Speaker 3: first scientists weren't super worried about how these things might
Speaker 3: cause potential health problems without mitigation. They said, look, this
Speaker 3: will only really cause health problems if people live under
Speaker 3: stressful conditions, if they have compromised immune systems. And then somebody,
Speaker 3: one of the boffins in a room somewhere years ago said, hey,
Speaker 3: though space is stressful for humans also.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, especially it's stressful on our immune systems, right,
Speaker 2: And we didn't know that at first. That's something we
Speaker 2: learned after launching you know enough human beings into space
Speaker 2: to realize, oh, something in the environment up there is
Speaker 2: causing the immune systems to be at least mildly compromised.
Speaker 2: And a lot of that has to do with the
Speaker 2: stress the body any human body undergoes when existing in space.
Speaker 2: Think about the flight itself to get out of there
Speaker 2: writing on that rocket, right, and then.
Speaker 4: You've got to go through megatraining to even prepare yourself
Speaker 4: to deal with those kinds of conditions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in the psychological stress of floating in space, like
Speaker 2: what is that? Were all those sci fi movies are
Speaker 2: about that? Almost almost every single one ends up addressing
Speaker 2: the psychological effect of being in space. That is a
Speaker 2: real thing that is occurring inside the minds and bodies
Speaker 2: of every astronaut and cosmonaut and who else goes up.
Speaker 4: That's right, And this was a bit of a red
Speaker 4: flag to some scientists, including a pharmaceutical scientist by the
Speaker 4: name of Sarah de Sager, who co authored a paper
Speaker 4: for a team of scientists in Belgium's Ghent University. In
Speaker 4: an exhaustive review of literature. They didn't find a whole
Speaker 4: heck of a lot, but what they did find was
Speaker 4: mostly related to the detection of these different fungal species
Speaker 4: and speaking to Live Science, she said concerning the findings
Speaker 4: of their paper specific fungi that have been found on
Speaker 4: space faring.
Speaker 5: Vessels such as Aspergillis flavas and.
Speaker 4: Members of the genus all Turnaria, which couldn't sound more
Speaker 4: spacey if you ask me, are known to produce carcinogenic
Speaker 4: and immunodepressing compounds. To your point, Matt, these molecules often
Speaker 4: form when fungi get themselves.
Speaker 2: Stressed exactly, Isn't that crazy? That's really really neat, like
Speaker 2: a contained stressful situation shared by different species somehow like
Speaker 2: contributing to one another, and then that fung guy can
Speaker 2: potentially the big problem here is that the fung guy
Speaker 2: can infect the humans because they are more like compromised, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, difficult environment cough cough outer space cough cough. I mean,
Speaker 3: and they also can survive in the vacuum of space
Speaker 3: for long periods of time. Right now, the fungus shows
Speaker 3: no signs of stopping exploration. And that's part of that
Speaker 3: is because because of their other superpower, they're highly resistant
Speaker 3: to Some species of fungus are highly resistant to radiation,
Speaker 3: let's go to Marta Cordisau, who is Ortisau.
Speaker 5: That's kind of great.
Speaker 3: Yeah, awesome microbiologist and love the way she writes and
Speaker 3: speaks with people. She is a microbiologist at the German
Speaker 3: Aerospace Center and Cologne, and she led a team that
Speaker 3: took a common black mold that is a regular at
Speaker 3: iss Aspergillis, Niger, and they just smacked it with X
Speaker 3: rays and heavy ions. The way she describes it is,
Speaker 3: we fired quote stupid amounts of radiation at these little guys.
Speaker 3: And I love that you're a scientist and you're saying
Speaker 3: stupid amounts of radiation, right, because that's a good way
Speaker 3: to communicate with folks.
Speaker 5: You know what that means.
Speaker 3: And what they found was astonishing. Also we'll have a
Speaker 3: bit of a tech explanation, but her team found that
Speaker 3: these specific spores could survive radiation doses of five to
Speaker 3: one thousand gray. And gray is by the way, for
Speaker 3: all of us old fogies in the crowd, gray is
Speaker 3: the new rad It's a measurement of X radiation exposure
Speaker 3: and humans in comparison, if you were exposed to point
Speaker 3: five gray, you start to get radiation sickness. If you
Speaker 3: get up the five gray, you're dead.
Speaker 5: Ben.
Speaker 4: In my mind, when you said gray is the new
Speaker 4: rad I was picturing as replacing like the word rad
Speaker 4: as a as a slang. So I'm just gonna start saying, Bro,
Speaker 4: that was totally gray.
Speaker 5: I think that might pick up What do you think, guys, happened?
Speaker 5: Gray happened?
Speaker 2: I think we should. I'm gonna start saying, cort Sao,
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 4: What did Cordisao, though, have to say about this radiation testing?
Speaker 2: Well, well, let's let's get in that. But just to
Speaker 2: quickly say this and connect it back to another episode
Speaker 2: or another topic, that UV radiation we're talking about isn't
Speaker 2: the exact same but thing, but it's very similar to
Speaker 2: the radiation from those lights we've talked about over and
Speaker 2: over and over again, the ones that kill the bacteria
Speaker 2: and you coli and all the stuff in the water.
Speaker 2: They're used in water treatment plants, same kind of radiation.
Speaker 2: Not quite the same thing, but in this you know,
Speaker 2: in this instance, it's the stuff that you would use
Speaker 2: for disinfectant in a medical situation like a hospital.
Speaker 3: And so Cortisol finds that these spores survive huge amounts
Speaker 3: of high energy UV radiation to your point, Matt, about
Speaker 3: like the energy emitted by some of those high powered lights.
Speaker 3: And the weird thing about this is this research led
Speaker 3: them to disprove some of the established protocols for cleaning spaceships.
Speaker 3: The radiation that is used to sterilize the surfaces of spacecraft,
Speaker 3: it's the same stuff this fungus is immune to. So well,
Speaker 3: it's like if you're trying to uh, it's like if
Speaker 3: you're trying to get rid of fruit flies and you say,
Speaker 3: the best way to do this is this smear rotten
Speaker 3: fruit on the walls.
Speaker 5: So what's the takeaway here, y'all?
Speaker 2: I think we.
Speaker 4: Can already say one of them is the fungi fungi fungi,
Speaker 4: mushrooms are freaking amazing. They're so versatile, they're so adaptable.
Speaker 4: And I think another is, like we said maybe a
Speaker 4: minute ago, Ben, we were kind of going back and forth,
Speaker 4: is that it's possible or actually probable. Then from the evidence,
Speaker 4: I would say the case that mushrooms fungi rather are
Speaker 4: actually better equipped to survive and explore space than almost
Speaker 4: any other form of life on planet Earth.
Speaker 2: It's true. I mean, they still, like we said, they
Speaker 2: need oxygen, right, and some a few other gases for
Speaker 2: them to breathe or live like that, and they need moisture.
Speaker 2: And if you could make an environment with that stuff
Speaker 2: and then just launch it out, guys, maybe we can
Speaker 2: be the pan spermia we've always been looking for.
Speaker 3: It was the friends we made along the way right there.
Speaker 3: That's crazy because it also tells us about the origin
Speaker 3: of life. I'd love to bring up pant spermia in that.
Speaker 3: Let's go to an astrobiologist at New Mexico State University,
Speaker 3: Paul Mason. He says, Look, the thing we don't always
Speaker 3: talk about is that no one knows how life went
Speaker 3: from prebiotic ingredients all the way to pretty complex micro
Speaker 3: organisms so early in history. And in fact, some scientists
Speaker 3: believe this evolution required more time than it passed since
Speaker 3: the planet first became habitable. So he points to panspermia.
Speaker 3: He says, maybe life originated elsewhere in our solar system,
Speaker 3: maybe somewhere even further away, farther away. Excuse me, and
Speaker 3: he says, now we know life from Earth can survive
Speaker 3: in space, so maybe it could have arrived on Earth
Speaker 3: from somewhere else is not stoned college kids talking in
Speaker 3: the door room. These are experts in their fields, and
Speaker 3: they're talking about exactly what I think more people should
Speaker 3: be exploring. Fungus as astronaut. Was it the first astronaut
Speaker 3: ever in you know, like Earth terms. Can we make
Speaker 3: deep space explorations with fungus as our crew?
Speaker 2: I don't know, Well, I mean imagine what that would
Speaker 2: look like. I think it would look. I'm no scientist,
Speaker 2: I'm no expert. I'm not even a stoned college student.
Speaker 2: The I feel like if there was some kind of
Speaker 2: carrier for a fungus, right that was traversing within a
Speaker 2: galaxy somehow, or in a solar system, you know, they
Speaker 2: got launched from some explosion of other heavenly bodies and
Speaker 2: on that whatever that projectile was, that meteor, that asteroid,
Speaker 2: if it had enough ice on it that was being
Speaker 2: burned off essentially as it's being warmed up, you could
Speaker 2: have an environment that had potentially the necessities for this
Speaker 2: you know, fungal growth, right, and it could just hitch
Speaker 2: your ride. And if it somehow miraculously survived the burn
Speaker 2: right of entering, well maybe there's no atmosphere right to
Speaker 2: burn it up upon entering at least close enough to
Speaker 2: a planet to land. I can totally see that.
Speaker 4: You know, we're speaking of Lovecraft a lot here too.
Speaker 4: It just reminded me of more so think the film
Speaker 4: adaptation but the Color Out of Space with Nicholas Cage.
Speaker 4: I think it involves a meteor that crashes into the
Speaker 4: Earth and then cracks open, and inside of it is
Speaker 4: this black slime mold stuff that kind of creeps around
Speaker 4: and infests things and turns them into monstrosities or sort
Speaker 4: of these hybridized kind of you know, abominations.
Speaker 3: And with that, now that we're getting to the deep water,
Speaker 3: the deep ink, I propose we pause for a word
Speaker 3: from our sponsors, of course, the famous Migo of Yugoth,
Speaker 3: not to be confused with the Migos of Atlanta or
Speaker 3: maybe the same, and we'll be right to dive further
Speaker 3: into this. We have returned. So can we purposely grow,
Speaker 3: for lack of a better phrase, non human astronauts. The
Speaker 3: short answer, believe it or not, is yes, it'd be
Speaker 3: expensive to build a craft and launch it out in
Speaker 3: the correct trajectory, but you could theoretically pick your favorite
Speaker 3: fungal life forms, pack them up into something, and shoot
Speaker 3: them to Mars, or shoot them to the moon be
Speaker 3: even easier, and then just you know, let a few
Speaker 3: million years pass, roll the dice right.
Speaker 2: To the moon. Fung guy.
Speaker 5: We go.
Speaker 3: It's the new stunk, It's the new game. Stop fungal astronauts.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's not on the list of priorities though,
Speaker 3: right because right now science humans is concerned with what
Speaker 3: can be learned from these superpowers. I was surprised to
Speaker 3: find that one of the big areas of study is
Speaker 3: what fungi can teach us about medications. Could you somehow
Speaker 3: adapt this survivability to ensure the safety of, for instance,
Speaker 3: a pharmacy on Mars, right, because you can't ship the
Speaker 3: various substances there easily, They're going to be exposed to
Speaker 3: radiation and all kinds of other variables.
Speaker 5: Well, hell, man, isn't penicillin a fungus.
Speaker 2: And yeast? Don't forget Baker's East.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Penicillium fungi first mass produced antibiotic.
Speaker 3: I mean, pretty crazy stuff, right, And what I think
Speaker 3: is crazier is that the future or the ancient past,
Speaker 3: seems to be rushing toward the present. There's a guy
Speaker 3: named Andrea Antones who's a research at the Macaw University
Speaker 3: of Science and Technology in China who says the same stuff,
Speaker 3: especially shouts out yeast and fermentation and says doubt on Earth,
Speaker 3: you know, fungi are employed to make food. We use
Speaker 3: yeast for fermentation as well as medicines, chemical enzymes for industry,
Speaker 3: and metal nanoparticles in different fields and applications. We're never
Speaker 3: going to be able to get rid of the fungi
Speaker 3: as we venture into space, so we need to understand them.
Speaker 3: That verges on philosophy in a way or therapy. I
Speaker 3: don't know. I don't know if fungus has a therapist.
Speaker 3: I also don't know where that joke's going.
Speaker 4: I think we're all just like deep in thought here
Speaker 4: because this is some heavy stuff, no question about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I had no idea that I guess yeast and
Speaker 2: other funguses were being launched into space, like as early
Speaker 2: as two thousand and nine to study things like how
Speaker 2: dangerous can bacteria and other forms like that be if
Speaker 2: you just let them hang out in space and you know,
Speaker 2: if they aren't experiencing the other factors that environments on
Speaker 2: Earth would like kind of mitigate some of the not
Speaker 2: virility but the again the dangers of like a bacteria
Speaker 2: or a yeast, like a yeast infection or something like that.
Speaker 2: So they launched a satellite where they let this stuff
Speaker 2: kind of just proliferate inside this little micro satellite, and
Speaker 2: then they were going to use that for their research
Speaker 2: to see if you can actually create drugs or some
Speaker 2: kind of medication that would would stop that growth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's it's smart, it's necessary if humanity's future
Speaker 3: is indeed the stars. And it's so strange, you know,
Speaker 3: it's it's a good lesson about antro centrism because the
Speaker 3: same factors that limit human reproduction outside of Earth are
Speaker 3: the same factors that help fungal reproduction. Like the lack
Speaker 3: of gravity is a huge disadvantage to developing embryos or
Speaker 3: fetuses in Earth life or human life, I should say,
Speaker 3: but it's awesome for these tiny guys, and we don't
Speaker 3: know how far they could go, right, Like here's a
Speaker 3: cool thing from Adriana Blashowitz or Blackowitz. She investigated fungi
Speaker 3: on the ISS, the International Space Station, and she said this,
Speaker 3: I think the biggest message is that fungi and bacteria
Speaker 3: are an integral part of human bodies. Wherever we go,
Speaker 3: fungi and bacteria will follow, so we can't get rid
Speaker 3: of them right like they're also more successful in space.
Speaker 3: I think the scientists, the human scientists, are smart when
Speaker 3: they say let's team up. And then of course maybe
Speaker 3: this is I don't know about you, guys, this is
Speaker 3: the thing that keeps catching me. What if aliens do
Speaker 3: contact human life on Earth or on the Moon, or
Speaker 3: on the Solar System somewhere, and it turns out that
Speaker 3: they are fungal life forms. What if their version of
Speaker 3: take me to your leader is their network sending out
Speaker 3: electrical signals that doesn't clock for the humans or the
Speaker 3: human astronauts, but all of a sudden, the fungus and
Speaker 3: the mold starts reacting in a new way to that message.
Speaker 2: I can imagine it, I don't. It feels to me
Speaker 2: like those organisms function on such a different time scale
Speaker 2: than humans and other larger life on Earth functions. I
Speaker 2: just wonder how the interaction would actually go right, What
Speaker 2: would what's the speed of the communication, what's the technology?
Speaker 2: Because you can't get just fungus in space, like just
Speaker 2: hanging out or traveling long far distances. It would have
Speaker 2: to use some kind of technology.
Speaker 4: Fund those technologies mushroom tech there, we go back to
Speaker 4: that again, but also like what is their intention and
Speaker 4: is there even an intention? Is it just purely physiologically
Speaker 4: driven and it need to just bro create and spread, spread, spread,
Speaker 4: Like I think that's what we see in like these
Speaker 4: complex systems of bacterium and and and and fungi.
Speaker 5: Is that, you know?
Speaker 4: But then we posit in this episode too. Is there
Speaker 4: a certain sentience to these things too that maybe we
Speaker 4: don't fully understand? Is there a language?
Speaker 5: And we we we've we've.
Speaker 4: Hit on the ability to have short term memory and
Speaker 4: to be able to quote unquote make decisions, but does
Speaker 4: it like go beyond that?
Speaker 5: Mm hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And it's the it's the same question, right, the same
Speaker 3: series of questions. How would that contact work? What if
Speaker 3: what if the extraterrestrials quote unquote that humans meet are
Speaker 3: some sort of interstellar lime mold and they're just expanding
Speaker 3: through vectors. What if Earth is just a little stop
Speaker 3: point or a way station on the path to what
Speaker 3: they're actually looking for, which is like spore prime or
Speaker 3: whatever that version of religion would be. If we could
Speaker 3: even ascribe religion to non human entities. It's fascinating stuff
Speaker 3: and we'd love to hear your thoughts.
Speaker 5: Folks.
Speaker 3: Was HP Lovecraft onto something? Do you have the answers
Speaker 3: to some of the questions we're asking here? Will fungal
Speaker 3: astronauts be okay with us? We poor earthlings who still
Speaker 3: enjoy eating mushrooms? Will they be fine with it? Or
Speaker 3: will it be like a bad bad look for us?
Speaker 4: Yeah, some sort of uffront like who's eating who here?
Speaker 4: Because after all, we know mushrooms eat us too.
Speaker 3: The circle of life and we hope that you participate
Speaker 3: in the circle of life on this show. Folks, let
Speaker 3: us know the answers. We can't wait to hear from you.
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