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