what's up this is jasper from the fungi academy for another special lesson of after skool
and today we're gonna find out if mushrooms are actually controlling us so let's start
in space space is really hard to survive it can be scorching or freezing ultraviolet and cosmic
radiation is everywhere radiation is basically the only thing that is present in the vacuum of
space yet some organisms can survive this vacuum the microscopic animal known as the tardigrade
is able to survive a journey to space for 11 days and still be alive and kicking after landing back
on earth just for your information here humans can't do that without a spacesuit all the air
gets sucked out of our bodies you pass out in 15 seconds and be dead in 90 seconds but tardigrades
are nothing compared to some of the organisms that life has been exposing to these extreme conditions
life is the lycan and fungi experiment on the international space station and most of what
they do is put things in space and see how long they can hang out there without dying
lichens are complex symbiotic organisms made up of a fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria
the fungus makes up most of the body while the alga and or cyanobacteria provide the
whole organism with food through photosynthesis this collaboration between fungi and plants is
so successful that it is thought to have evolved independently from each other more than five times
over the eons one of the toughest lichens out there is known as Xanthoria elegans more than
71 percent of specimens of this species survived for more than one and a half years bare naked
in space that's not all this Xanthoria elegans is also able to survive a pressure of at least
50 gigapascal this means that the super strong being could survive the first and second phases
of the interplanetary transfer process wow lots of complicated words but why is this important
because this evidence suggests that life might not have originated on earth at all our planet might
just be substrates that is inoculated by the fungi this concept is called panspermia panspermia has
many different philosophical approaches sometimes i like to fantasize that fungi and their spores
are biotechnology engineered by an ancient alien civilization wanting to spread life all over the
universe anywhere the conditions are just right in my mind they created a massive machine producing
countless spores aimlessly wandering a search of a substrate to inoculate a somewhat more plausible
idea is lithopanspermia. lithopanspermia proposes that extremophile life could survive being blasted
into space after its home planet was slammed with an asteroid and part of the crust was shot
into space after the collision after such a cataclysmic event the fungus and its spores
would find themselves flying through space on this most low-tech of spaceships a simple rock
we know as an asteroid this asteroid could hit a planet in its own solar system but given enough
velocity it could potentially escape the orbit of its sun and roam its galaxy until one day bam
it hits a young planet ready for life to flourish there alright i might go really far out here but i
don't think that even the hearty santoria elegance will survive such a long trip to space but its
spores just might fungal spores can be considered the nearly indestructible cousin of plant seeds
microscopic little saves filled with dna that can easily survive space so much so that the
international space station is actually facing a mold problem marta cortao a microbiologist
at the german aerospace center tried to fix the problem by blasting the aspergillus mold with and
i'm quoting here stupid amounts of radiation up to a thousand grey that's 200 more times
more radiation than a human could survive but simply surviving radiation isn't enough to be
an interstellar or intergalactic space traveler you need to be able to not die for a very long
time but fungi got that covered the oldest viable spores found on earth are 250 million years old
let's imagine that that bam was earth in a very young stage when our peeled blue dots
was nothing but water and rock that the very first organism on earth was in fact an alien fungus from
another solar system or maybe an even an alien lichen given enough time a couple of billion years
for example evolution does its thing life becomes more complex species die out and change form
elgar start taking over the waters the first primitive animals are evolving maybe the first
fungus is crawling on lands right now we believe that life originated about 3.4 billion years ago
and we have some solid evidence that mycelium has been around for 2.4 billion years although
hard to find the first evidence we have of lichens are from about 600 million years ago
well the first animals we have comes in about 540 million years ago yet some people claim
that this animal organism known as dickinsonia might actually be more closely related to fungi
if you're open to the possibility maybe this ancestral animal organism is the missing link
between fungi and animals let's fast forward a bit to 470 million years ago
when these massive lichens standing eight meters tall known as prototax cities ruled the earth
recent evidence suggests they might have been a vital food chain and housing source for the
first insects moving from the ocean to lands and yeah they most likely helped turn the
barren rock surface of earth into soil ready made for plants to make their move to land
the first evidence we have of plants with roots are peat mosses about 410 years ago but here comes
the kicker the first ancestors of mycorrhizal fungi dates back to 460 million years ago
that means we have evidence of mycorrhizal fungi 50 million years before we have evidence
of the plants that have roots a huge reason why some people claim that fungi were the
roots of plants before plants evolved to have roots of their own nowadays mycorrhizae fungi
connect with the roots of plants in one of nature's most beautiful symbiotic harmonies
pushing forward the evolution of our planet by supporting our organisms and showing us humans
a thing or two about collaboration the great thinker terence mckenna conjured the stone ape
theory into reality in his book food of the gods published in 1991 in that hypothesis he argues
that human consciousness evolved because of our consumption of entheogenic mushrooms of the genus
philosophy empanadas aka psychedelic mushrooms maybe this sounds a little zany but recent
papers claim that just like us the whole genus of psilocybe mushrooms aka the magic kind originated
in africa 10 to 20 million years ago around the same time the humans started diverging from our
primate ancestors approximately 13 million years ago coincidence i think not i believe that fungi
were aware of the potential that their ancestors had and decided to evolve a group of fungi that
produce mushrooms containing compounds capable of expanding the cerebral capacity of our ancestors
mushrooms of the genus philosophy tend to grow in disturbed areas places where lots of life roams
grazing animals live close to our ancestors and everyone knows what grows out of their tongue
but even more obscure and entheogenic mushrooms like psilocybe semilanceata also known as the
liberty cap grow in disturbed areas open grass plains like meadows lawns and pastures Psilocybe
Cyanescens also known as the wavy cap and many more wood-loving species of philosophy primarily
grow on wood chips especially in and along the perimeter of mulched plant beds in urban areas
it's almost as if these fungi are saying eat us we know you're here eat us this idea is fortified
with the overwhelming evidence we have of these mushrooms helping with some of the biggest plagues
of our time anxiety depression ptsd one could argue that they want us to consume them to help
us out but maybe back to space or more so our interest in space we've always gazed upon the
stars it's part of what makes us human and part of what we've lost in the urbanization of our
civilization light pollution kills the connection to our astral bodies in such a manner that when i
grew up in the netherlands one of the most light polluted areas in the world i was never even
aware of the faces of the moon or even able to see most of the constellations our ancestors could see
ever since we could dream while awake we've dreamed of the stars you could almost say it's
part of the human condition now the question is was this an accident or is this by design
if you adhere even slightly to the stoned ape hypothesis and you know how huge a role fungi
played in the evolution of our consciousness who says they ever stopped doing this maybe we
are not much better than the simple carpet and being controlled by Ophiocordyceps unilateralis
our mind is being taken over for a much greater goal though to get to space
to make the beginning of this connection clear we have to talk about beer we know we've been
brewing beer since the birth of agriculture the beer before bread hypothesis even claims that
the agricultural revolution happened because of beer bread was just a happy accident beer or wine
that our ancestors used to brew was nothing like the beer we know today before the reinheitgebot
the laws that continue to regulate beer brewing in germany was introduced in germany in 1516.
beers and wines would be a chemical cocktails of herbs spices and fungi often highly psychoactive
greek accounts talk about wines that needed to be diluted to 12 parts water for one part
wine because of its potency and this was long before destilation so it wasn't to cut the booze
since naturally fermented drinks wouldn't be much stronger than fifteen percent alcohol content
because of brian murray rescues amazing book the immortality key we know that ergot was used in
the brewings of the eleusinian mysteries ergot also known as claviceps purpurey
was the fungus that albert hoffman used to synthesize lsd-25 tripping on a tall glass
on ergoth laced beer the philosophers of the greek golden age would visit these mysteries and have
interactions with the divine some would look at the problems of the state politics social studies
and others looked at the stars the pythagorean philosopher laos calculated the sizes of the
planets and the sun and since the sun was very clearly larger than the earth
he understood that the earth was rotating around the sun unfortunately most of the astronomy and
astrology that was practiced around this time was lost this idea of the earth rotating around
the sun is called heliocentrism that is that the sun helios is at the center of everything
but heliocentrism didn't lift off until nicholas copernicus started to develop his work in 1514.
two years before the reinhardt's reboot became the national norm in germany and soon thereafter
spread to the rest of europe we don't have to leap too far out to theorize that maybe
copernicus was sipping some psychedelic booze when he rediscovered heliocentrism
of course he didn't even publish his finding until the year of his death in 1543
because he was aware of the consequences of such a discovery during those times
as the story goes the copernican revolution followed and the rest as they say is history
but what about those trippy drinks could it be possible that there were underground brewing
facilities of psychedelic infused beer and that all the great astronomers of the renaissance
carried on the legacy of the eleusinian mysteries this is pure speculation yes but what followed in
our era isn't too far off from such a story after the second world war lsd a compound
synthesized from ergot a fungus spread through the halls of psychology schools and slid under the
tongues of science fiction writers scientists and astronomers francis crick the nobel prize winning
father of modern genetics was under the influence of lsd when he first figured out the double helix
structure of dna in the 50s and according to his biography richard feynman who won a nobel prize
for his work in quantum electrodynamics was also quite a fan of cannabis ketamine and you know it
lsd suppose these great thinkers during the age of psychedelic freedom found so many powerful
ideas through working with entheogens do you think the highly competitive scientific scene
wouldn't catch wind of this i think just like in the renaissance people in these periods from all
over the world were experimenting with the fungal and entheogens they had at their disposal at the
time it could have been philosophy similanciata or any other citizen-containing mushroom during
the copernican revolution maybe some secret society had even found the secret recipe of the
ergotized beers from the eleusinian mysteries who knows but in the 50s and 60s there was no doubt
lsd was the drug of choice and the space race our biggest leap forward into the vastness of
the universe roughly started around 1955 and ended in 1975 right around when lsd and other
entheogenic substances were working their magic on our minds were we finally fulfilling our destiny
shooting into space in search of our long-lost fungal ancestors perhaps unfortunately the war
on drugs came hammering down in 1971 and without the freedom to ask our fungal friends for advice
on a worldwide skills we lost interest in space but the times they are changing
the use of lsd among united states adults increased 56 percent from
2015 to 2018 and what do you know our interest in space seems to be increasing too
spacex is building ambitious plans to colonize the solar system and in a great piece of irony as
hundreds of spacex spaceships take flight millions if not trillions of fungal spores have hitched a
ride back into space elon musk himself is said to be open to psychedelics i wonder how many of
his ideas he's had while journeying with fungal and entheogens the psychedelic revolution is in
full force and drugs are rounding the curve of its victory lab in the war on drugs entire states are
decriminalizing and even legalizing these natural compounds with help from us and science for far
too long and finally this ridiculous aberration in our collective history of psychedelic exploration
is coming to an end so let's recap for a second fungi are shown to survive the vacuum of space
potentially for eons they have the tools at their disposal to basically terraform a planet
into a lush thriving environment that could one day evolve an organism like our ancestors the
fungi then created a compound that would help that organism develop its brain consciousness
and therefore its technologies this evolution comes with a trait looking at the sky to see
what's out there our innate curiosity making us who we are fungal and theogens amplify this and
before you know it this organism it birtheth is shooting rockets into space ruggeds filled and
covered with fungal spores ready to colonize the rest of the galaxy are we being used just like the
zombie ant whose brain is taken over by a fungus so it can help to spread its spores i'm not so
sure but i said let the fungi inoculate our minds and in the process our hearts let them use us to
get into space and spread to the universe we will learn so much about ourselves in the meanwhile
and with all they do for us that's the least we can do for them thank you so much for tuning into
another epic fungal educational experience with fungi academy and after skool if you want to learn
more about the wonderous world of mycology right now we are offering our mycology 101 class for
all after skool students for just seven dollars check the link below to learn more and much love
still my curiosity