Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast Cosmic Queries - The Fungus Among Us with Merlin Sheldrake About this episode Can mushrooms take over your mind? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Matt Kirshen explore the weird world of fungi with fun-guy fungus expert and ecologist, Merlin Sheldrake. Could inactive spores survive space?
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
0:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. This is gonna be a cosmic queries edition on the subject of mushrooms. We're gonna find out where they come from, what they're doing and why, and especially what is their relationship to humans. And I got Matt Kirshen as my co-host. Matt, how you doing, man?
0:35 Matt Kirshen? I'm very good, Neil. How's it going?
0:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's been too long, dude.
0:38 Matt Kirshen? Yeah, it's nice to be back.
0:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I miss you and you're a host of, did I get it right? Probably Science?
0:43 Matt Kirshen? That is exactly it.
0:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ah, it's got to end this time.
0:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Excellent. I'm a one-time guest on your show. Emphasis on one time.
0:54 Matt Kirshen? We would have you back in a heartbeat. I never want to abuse my connections, friendships.
0:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Your access privileges.
1:00 Matt Kirshen? Yeah.
1:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, but I love it when you're out there just bringing science to the public in a whole other way. And you're an important sort of cog in a wheel that we're all trying to keep turning.
1:11 Matt Kirshen? I appreciate that. We definitely are doing it in another way to the people who really know their stuff.
1:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And even if it's only probably science, I'm still good with that. Well, I think neither you nor I are mushroom experts, although I've eaten a few in my day.
1:25 Matt Kirshen? That's very true.
1:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We combed the world to find one of the world's experts, maybe the world's experts on this subject. And it's Merlin Sheldrake. Merlin, welcome to StarTalk.
1:37 Speaker 02 Thanks for having me, Neil. It's good to be here.
1:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so that accent, that places you right in London right now? Is that where you're coming from?
1:43 Speaker 02 That's right.
1:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you're an ecologist, like a mushroom ecologist. You're also author. Your book just came out in paperback. I think the hardcover came out last year. But often the paperbacks do much better than the hardback. So this will be anyone's chance to pick this up. And you can't miss it if you want this book. If you love mushrooms, even if you don't love mushrooms, but wonder what the hell are those things coming out of the ground? Entangle Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures. That is ambitious, dude. So before we get to our Q and A with our... Fanbase, I just want to sort of lay some groundwork here. So if you can tell us, oh, but just, sorry, let me finish your pedigree here.
2:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You've got a PhD in tropical ecology from the University of Cambridge, right? And you specialized in the underground fungal networks in the tropical forests of Panama. This is just so exotic and like so fun. Maybe I'd do this if I weren't an astrophysicist. So can you just answer the question, what the hell is a mushroom? Because it doesn't have leaves, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't have photosynthesis. I think most people don't know what they are. So please illuminate us.
3:02 Speaker 02 So mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungi. And fungi are a kingdom of life. So that's as broad a category as animals or plants. And so fungi are a much bigger world than just mushrooms. Only a few fungal species, a few tens of thousands, produce mushrooms. But most live their lives as branching, fusing networks of tubular cells known as mycelium.
3:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow. So, so when, you know, when I grew up, there was, there was no mushroom kingdom. All right, that's how old I am. So when did mushrooms decide?
3:39 Matt Kirshen? They got together as they do.
3:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They got together.
3:43 Matt Kirshen? In their networks.
3:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I missed that memo. When, when did that happen, please?
3:48 Speaker 02 They, well, they won their independence, taxonomically speaking, in the late 60s.
3:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow, so that's not quite in the textbooks that I would have had because that's how old I am. Interesting. And so what were they considered before they were their own kingdom, just plants?
4:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, so unglamorous, lower plants.
4:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Lower, see, back then, everyone was putting higher and lower. They always got to rank things that way. That's just, that's, that's not, that's not right.
4:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so, but it's nonetheless a plant. I mean, it grows out of the ground. So when I think of the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom, you're saying now the word plant does not include these spores that rise up out of the ground that we call mushrooms?
4:29 Speaker 02 That's right. So fungi are more closely related to animals than plants. And they also behave more like animals in their nutritional strategies. Plants photosynthesize. They build the energy that they need from the sun and carbon dioxide in the process of photosynthesis. But animals have to find food ready-made in the world, which they then digest. And fungi have to do that, too. So they're what's known as heterotrophs.
4:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now, I think I knew that about their relationship, but I knew it only sort of indirectly. When I looked at the Tree of Life, what I learned was that the common ancestor between mushrooms and all animal life split later than that common ancestor split from green plants. And that blew my mind because I think that allows me to say what you just said, that mushrooms and animals are more closely related than either of them are to green plants. Am I allowed to say that upon knowing this about the Tree of Life?
5:26 Speaker 02 Yes.
5:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Damn. Okay, so now, so they grow. But they also, and we can eat them just as food or we can ingest them.
5:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Who did the experiments to find out that mushrooms can affect us psychologically? Is someone just going there? How does that work in practice?
5:49 Speaker 02 Well, it's a good question. So until the early part of the 20th century, there are only a few pockets of humans on the planet knew that some species of mushroom produced psychoactive compounds and would eat these mushrooms as part of their ritual and spiritual practices.
6:07 Speaker 02 That knowledge then spread to the West. And after that point, this handful of tropical species, you know, from Mexico, were known to produce psilocybin mushrooms. But but once that became common knowledge, then people started to look all around the world. And now over 200 species of fungi are known to produce psilocybin. And it's very interesting, that process, because now, how do you know? People test them. Psilocybin bruises blue when you when you crush the mushroom. And so you can sometimes have a clue from the color. You can have a clue from which species are closely related to each other or not, and which ones you might reasonably expect to be trippy. But there are always some surprises.
6:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So this this chemical, psilocybin?
6:55 Speaker 02 Psilocybin.
6:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So has that been has that been isolated so that now you don't actually have to grow the mushroom? You just get it out of somebody's laboratory?
7:03 Speaker 02 That's right. It was actually first isolated and named by Albert Hofmann, the guy who discovered LSD. But now, in many of the studies that are being carried out, they use pure crystalline psilocybin produced in a lab.
7:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So he discovered it not while he was under the influence of LSD, presumably, because that completely messes with your capacity to think.
7:23 Speaker 02 Well.
7:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And interpret reality.
7:25 Speaker 02 I haven't heard that he was on LSD while he was taking it, but you never know.
7:29 Matt Kirshen? So how complicated is it to synthesize?
7:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, can we just do that now, like in my kitchen? What do I need?
7:35 Speaker 02 Well, you need some.
7:36 Matt Kirshen? I would have thought that the easier way to get psilocybin in your kitchen would be to find a mushroom that has it, rather than setting up the lab. But maybe I'm wrong. Let's ask it.
7:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, I have a big chemistry kitchen. You don't know.
7:46 Matt Kirshen? That's very true. I'm talking about my, the average person's kitchen.
7:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, I mean, it's definitely true. It's easier to grow them, grow the mushrooms than it would be to set up a lab and go through all the analytic procedures required to isolate, synthesize and isolate the molecule.
8:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So tell me about this, and then we'll go straight to questions after this, because I'm just so, I just want to lay some groundwork here. This mycelium, so I hosted this series on Cosmos, and we spent an entire episode, most of an episode, talking about the mycelium. But at the time, I didn't uniquely associate it with mushrooms themselves. I thought of it as just sort of this plant network, where all the plants are sort of communicating. But are you saying mushrooms have their own mycelium? Or they participate in a larger mycelium of the plant kingdom as well?
8:35 Speaker 02 So mycelium is a fungal talent and not a plant talent. And so fungi make mycelium. Some of those fungal species produce mushrooms that we see. Many of them don't produce mushrooms. And these different fungal species, whether they produce mushrooms or not, some of them will relate to have relationships, intimate trading relationships with plants. And so plug into plants and they exchange nutrients. And some of those fungal networks can plug into multiple plants at the same time. And those plants are also promiscuous and can plug into multiple fungal networks. And the result is shared overlapping networks of plants and fungi. And that's what's referred to by the wood wide web, I think what you meant there.
9:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The wood wide, the wood wide web. I think that's what it was, yeah.
9:21 Matt Kirshen? I'm curious about something. Just, I have, we have this impression that fungi just sort of spontaneously appear. Because, you know, if you leave food in the fridge for too long, it gets mouldy. I once lived in a pretty grotty shared house where we broke the toilet at a party. And then a week later, because no one fixed it, there were mushrooms growing out of the carpet. So that kind of thing can happen. How many spores of fungi are just generally in the air all the time? Because there must be the spores originally for them to then land on something and then start to grow.
9:55 Speaker 02 Lots. In fact, fungal spores.
9:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Exactly how many? Lots.
10:01 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, so I got a number if you want. Fifty million tonnes of fungal spores are produced and released into the air every year, which is the weight of 500,000 blue whales. And these spores are such a large presence in the atmosphere that they can precipitate the water droplets that go on to form clouds and rain. So they can change the weather.
10:20 Matt Kirshen? Wow.
10:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, just in case people don't know, you can more readily form, generate a raindrop if there's something to nucleate the condensation on and that it greatly enhances that. Process. So, yeah, so I didn't know. So it's raining mushrooms is what you're telling us?
10:39 Matt Kirshen? I'm glad I asked that now because that was a hell of an answer.
10:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That was good. That was great. Let's go to questions, Matt.
10:44 Matt Kirshen? All right. Well, well, there's a couple that Neil's already touched on with his questions, but I just want a slightly more specific answer from Tarasina Rojas's question. What are the differences between plants and fungi? And then, and then also which ones evolve first? I believe the answer to that is mushrooms evolve first and fungi evolve first.
11:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, plants, I think.
11:06 Speaker 02 So first, firstly.
11:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, let him answer the question.
11:09 Matt Kirshen? Yeah, that would be the other way around.
11:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, Matt and I agree to shut up. Merlin, go for it.
11:14 Speaker 02 So, so plants photosynthesize. Fungi don't photosynthesize and have to find food and digest it.
11:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so what are they eating? What is the food?
11:24 Speaker 02 Well, they can eat many things. They're the great decomposers of the planet. And they underwrite much of the regenerative capacity of the biosphere because of their voracious appetites. So wood, for example, if fungi didn't decompose wood, then the earth would be piled kilometers deep in unrotted forests.
11:44 Speaker 02 But they can also eat all sorts of unusual things. There's a specialist mold that lives in Canadian distilleries off the vapors evaporating from whiskey barrels as they age. There's a fungus called the kerosene fungus, which lives in the fuel tanks of aircraft. So they have, they have a wide variety of different appetites.
12:03 Matt Kirshen? Wow.
12:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You know, if they wanted to, they could just be our overlords from what you're describing here.
12:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, totally, or underlords.
12:12 Matt Kirshen? Well, that does connect a bit to Low Ruzi's question. Starts with very nice things, saying big fans of the show. And then asks, mushrooms are not only very resilient to extreme conditions, they also have the ability to spread even when they're technically inactive and to thrive when conditions become bearable again. In that respect, do we know if mushroom spores can survive the vacuum of space? And if yes, can we imagine them seeding distant planets and making a better job of surviving than the human race?
12:41 Speaker 02 So fungal spores are really tough and some of them can survive these extraterrestrial conditions. Other types of fungal organism can too. Lichens, which are a symbiotic organism, a combination of fungi and bacteria and algae. They can, they're some of the hardiest organisms known and when they're taken to extraterrestrial conditions, they're suspended on the outside of the International Space Station in trays known as the exposed facility. But they're, they dry out very quickly, of course, in the vacuum of space, but then they can withstand the radiation and the temperature swings. And when you bring them back to Earth, they rehydrate and get on with living.
13:22 Speaker 02 So there are different aspects of the fungal kingdom, different parts of the fungal kingdom that can withstand these extreme conditions.
13:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So they don't need space suits, is what you're telling us?
13:34 Speaker 02 No.
13:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. Actually, I didn't know the space station had sort of an outdoor tray for the vacuum of space experiment lab. I didn't know that.
13:46 Speaker 02 Well, they've also tested them in the Mars simulation facility, where you can just put them in a box and turn on Mars and you can just dial up or dial down the radiation to test them to the uttermost limits of survival. Pretty useful.
14:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Man, I have a whole new respect for mushrooms now. Damn. Okay, Matt, keep them coming.
14:05 Matt Kirshen? Okay, so Alec asks, Alec from the Oregon coast says hi from there and hope we're all doing well. And how long have fungi been on the Earth? And does that give a glimpse into what prehistoric animals might have eaten?
14:20 Speaker 02 So, general consensus from fossils and from looking at DNA is that fungi have been around for just over a billion years. But mysterious fossils bearing an uncanny resemblance to mycelial fungi have been found in lava deposits dating from over two billion years ago. And it's not clear whether they were true fungi or not, but they certainly look like fungi. And if they were fungi, it would totally upend everything that's thought about the history of mycelial life.
14:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so, but do you think mushrooms would have been a part of early animal diets?
14:58 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean... I don't see why animals would neglect these nutritious, delicious organisms growing within easy reach.
15:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Would an animal knowingly, an animal not human knowingly, eat a mushroom that has psychedelic properties?
15:21 Speaker 02 It's a very good question. I was talking to Michael Bug, who runs the toxicology reports for the North American Mycological Association. And he has a number of reports of dogs that watched their owners picking psychedelic mushrooms, and after watching them would also eat the psychedelic mushrooms, and would appear to be under the influence. There's only one example of a cat that repeatedly ate its owner's psychedelic mushrooms, and appeared to be "bemushroomed," in his words.
15:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? See, I think cats are always eating mushrooms, based on the behavior patterns that I've seen.
15:54 Matt Kirshen? I have no idea how you would tell my cat whether he's taken any mushrooms.
15:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's what I'm saying.
16:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And before we go to break, let me just understand this. The pronunciation of the plural of fungus. I've heard fungi and fungi. How do the Italians say it?
16:16 Speaker 02 The Italians say fungi.
16:19 Speaker 02 I say fungi, but people say fungi, people say fungi. It's really up to you.
16:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, okay.
16:25 Matt Kirshen? I'm glad to hear that, because I think I've said at least three different versions in the course of just the last 15 minutes.
16:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So I will do as the Romans do, and call it fungi. Is that correct? Fungi, that's what I'll do. I don't know about Matt, I don't know where his allegiances are found, but I'm going with fungi. And just before we cut here, I just want to finish out some of your resume. It's interesting here, you're on the board of, the advisory board of the Fungi Foundation. That's great, that just sounds like... Is that on a business card, you know, advisor to the fungi, you know? It's just, it just sounds so, so otherworldly, if you will. And the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, what do you do there? Prevent people from putting pesticides or something, or herbicides?
17:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I didn't know the underground networks needed a lobby, you know, lobbyists.
17:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, part of it's just mapping the, mapping the networks around the world. What type of fungal networks and fungal networks interacting with bacterial species and the plant species? Do you find in different places? Because obviously we can't know what damage we're doing until we know what's there. But it's very clear that we will be damaging these networks with.
17:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But it doesn't feel like they care about, I mean, well, I mean, not speak for them, for the mushrooms. Let me just say broadly, if they are all over the place, then why should it matter to us if we dig up some ground over here and not over there? I mean, what is, what is it you're actually trying to protect?
17:56 Speaker 02 So many fungal networks enable plant life. Plant life would be inconceivable without the fungi that live in their roots, without the fungi that live in their leaves and in their shoots. In fact, plants wouldn't have evolved if it hadn't been for their relationships with fungi. So if we depend, I'll say, on an ecosystem of forest for various reasons, then, and we kill all the fungi in that forest.
18:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There it is.
18:19 Speaker 02 Then we're making a trouble, trouble for ourselves.
18:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
18:22 Speaker 02 And for everyone else who lives in the forest. So there are lots of reasons to, so some fungi are able to withstand intense conditions, but many fungi aren't. And so it's for these fungi that we need to be mindful.
18:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Got it, got it. Okay, and that's part, this is the perennial challenge of anything we do to the environment. Because one thing depends on another, depends on another, and ultimately comes back to bite us in the ass, right?
18:48 Speaker 02 Exactly, and the most worrying things are the unknown unknowns. And there's so much of fungal life we don't understand, there's so much of microbial life we don't understand. And so we're in a kind of a race to just, to get a picture of what everyone's doing so that we can avoid making even more catastrophic mistakes than we have.
19:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's why we have you. So let's take a break here and when we come back, we're going to find out more of what our fanbase wants to know about mushrooms, their psychedelic properties, and anything else that mushrooms have been hiding from us for a billion years on StarTalk.
19:34 Speaker 03 Hey, I'm Roy Hill Percival and I support StarTalk on Patreon, bringing the universe down to earth. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
19:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're back, StarTalk, Cosmic Queries. We're talking about mushrooms. Everything you ever wanted and never wanted to know about them is going to happen in this show. I got with me my co-host Matt Kirshen. Matt, what's your, your social media handle that you want to put out there?
20:12 Matt Kirshen? Oh, at Matt Kirshen on Twitter and Matt underscore Kirshen on Instagram, but I very rarely use that. Twitter's the one to look at.
20:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, Kirshen, K R.
20:22 Matt Kirshen? K I R S H E N. But if you, if you just, if you're not sure, just bang anything close to that into Google and it'll find me.
20:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's very confident of you.
20:31 Matt Kirshen? There just, there just aren't many of us. There's, there's very few Matt Kirshen in the world of any spelling.
20:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You and Google go way back. I get it. Okay. So for this mushroom expertise, we've got Merlin Sheldrake, who's got a book out just now in paperback, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures. This is an audacious title. I'm loving every minute of it. So Merlin, great to have you. Are you active on social media as well? I think I saw you have a Twitter handle, Merlin Sheldrake.
21:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, and Instagram, not in Sheldrake.
21:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And Instagram, yeah. There's no other Merlin Sheldrakes in the world. You're the only Merlin I know in the world. Did your parents have very high expectations for you?
21:12 Speaker 02 You know, I'm not sure. They said that they were calling me Merlin after the bird, not after the wizard. But I complained that I didn't think they can really make that kind of distinction.
21:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So let's pick it up. We're in the middle of our flow of questions, and these are all Patreon members. We used to only lead off with Patreon questions, and now they own the whole stash. So every one of these is from Patreon members. I just want to publicly thank them for their support. It enables us to do experiments that might not otherwise be commercial. And thank you for that. It keeps us going.
21:46 Matt Kirshen? Yeah, and there's some great questions that have come in from the patrons, including a couple of people have asked about the, this phenomenon of fungi taking over other animals. So Zach Metcalfe says, "Some species of," I hope I'm pronouncing this one correctly. Is it cordyceps fungi? "Can infect insect hosts and compel them to die in very specific locations. Famous examples are infected bullet ants climbing trees and dying on the underside of leaves. The ideal location for spores to rot from the skin and infect more ants below. How do they, how do the fungi relay such specific instructions to its insect victims? Is the electrochemistry of walking and climbing really so straightforward as to be hijacked by fungus?"
22:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Man, and this, they sound like, they, they sound evil.
22:32 Matt Kirshen? Yeah. I mean, that is quite a remarkable thing to do.
22:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is, this is an evil set of species you got here, Merlin. All right, so what's going on there?
22:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, so first, I wouldn't underestimate the metabolic abilities of fungi. So they're metabolic wizards and can do all sorts of extraordinary things. So even if it was a complicated task to hijack an insect and control its behavior with a great deal of precision, which no doubt it is, I wouldn't put that past them. And we don't need to try it because we know that this takes place. But broadly speaking, I mean, the degree of precision is remarkable. So you can have, for example, a carpenter ant and off you a cordyceps fungus. And the fungus will grow into the ant, start growing its way through its body, through its legs, through its cavities. It won't grow into its brain, though, which is interesting. And then it produces, whatever it does. It produces in the ant irresistible urge to climb upwards, overwriting the normal instinct of the ant,
23:27 Speaker 02 which is to stay close to the ground for the purposes of safety. So the ant climbs up in a syndrome known as summit disease. And then it finds at the nearest vein on the underside of a leaf, at exactly the right height for the fungus to fruit, in the case of offy acordeseps and carpenter ants, about 25 centimeters off the floor of the forest. And then around noon, the ant performs a death grip. And it grips onto the leaf vein. And the offy acordeseps has special needs. And then the fungus kills the ant and it grows a stalk out of the ant's head and rains down spores on unfortunate ants passing below.
24:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It grows out of its head?
24:05 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm, yeah.
24:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Man, so the movie Alien has nothing on this, really, because that's just coming out of your belly. That's the normal place you might find something growing inside of you. But it grows out of its head?
24:17 Speaker 02 There are lots of different ways that... Lots of different fungi do it differently. There's fungi that infect cicadas and it causes the back third of the cicada's body to break off and for the male cicadas to become hypersexual, despite the fact that their genitals have long since crumbled away. And the cicada spouts spores from this broken back end of its body as it flies around erratically.
24:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, we're in a cicada invasion now in the northeast of the United States, you surely know that. I committed online that I said I would eat three of them when they finally...
24:49 Speaker 02 So you might want to watch out because the massive spore are the fungi that overtake these cicadas and no doubt that we're doing it right outside your house. And they do it, they produce psilocybin and also amphetamine. So if you eat enough of them, then you might start feeling stranger than you realized.
25:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, and I might have accredited the cicada, but it was really the invading mushroom spores that would have done it to me.
25:14 Matt Kirshen? That is astonishing.
25:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a good heads up there, thank you.
25:17 Speaker 02 You'd probably need to eat quite a few before you noticed that. I think you'd be safe with three.
25:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, that is not happening. No risk, eating any more than I committed. So Matt, keep them coming.
25:31 Matt Kirshen? Well, a related question from Teresina, who asked earlier, was is it possible for a fungi to take over a control of a relatively large animal? And to what extent do they influence our own behavior?
25:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, how about mammals, like small mammals, like, you know, underscurrying mice and thing, you know, field mice, that sort of thing?
25:48 Speaker 02 So, these fungi that take over insects with this great precision, none of them are known to take over animals, mammals. Mammals are a bit trickier because we have a higher body temperature, which tends to put off fungi, doesn't always put them off, and there are a number of fungi that can cause a big problem in an animal body, in a human body. But there aren't any examples of quite such specific alterations. There are fungi that will infect you and cause a life-threatening disease and make you feel strange and will change your behavior because it's made you sick, but not that will grow inside you and puppet your behavior with the same degree.
26:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or make you climb up a tree and scatter spores out of your abdomen.
26:25 Matt Kirshen? So, when I was doing that, I can't blame that on any kind of fungi?
26:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You did that? Yep, that's, you gotta own that one, Matt, that's all you. So, I got one for you, and I wanna pretend I'm a Patreon member now. So, if you ever get what they call athlete's feet, the cure for that is antifungal cream. So, are you telling me, if I have athlete's feet, I have fungus growing in my toes?
26:54 Speaker 02 That's right, on your toes, more than in your toes.
26:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it's one of these things you study. This is your fault. You, your, your species, your families of species are giving me athlete's feet, that's what you're saying.
27:08 Speaker 02 Neil, I mean, your subject matter wiped out the dinosaurs in big cataclysmic.
27:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, you got me there. You got me there. I got no comeback on that. Okay, we have an asteroid the size of Mount Everest that took out a whole, seventy percent of Earth's species. Okay, all right, I take it back. But that is a kind of mushroom, is what you're saying?
27:33 Speaker 02 It's a fungus. It doesn't produce mushrooms, but it is a fungus.
27:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, sorry, mushroom is the fruit, but it's a fungus. I got you. Damn.
27:39 Matt Kirshen? So, Gordon, Patreon, Patreon Gordon Vu asks something related, says, "I suffered from jock itch," which I believe is the same, I think that's the same fungus, and the doctor said it was a fungal infection. Does this fungus grow elsewhere besides the human body?
27:55 Speaker 02 You know, I'm not totally sure.
27:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is too much information about this guy's hygiene. Do we really have to find? He puts out his name and he's telling the world he's got jock itch.
28:07 Matt Kirshen? It's all science.
28:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, it's for science. Very good. Okay. We have, we have a devoted following. So they're, he didn't even say, I have a friend who has jock itch. He didn't even say that.
28:19 Matt Kirshen? I think that's worse, though. I think if you know about your friend's jock itch.
28:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a good point. What the hell are you doing knowing about your friend's jock itch? Okay, so, so is that, is it the same species? Because what's interesting Merlin, I learned is that head lice is a different subspecies of lice than a genital lice.
28:43 Speaker 02 So I couldn't tell you whether they're the same. I suspect that they're slightly different and I couldn't tell you whether or not it, um, it lives in other places. But it's very common for fungi to, to be able to live in different situations. If you have an oyster mushroom mycedium, that would grow on a book, that would grow on used cigarette butts. If you do trainers in the right way, it could grow on grains, it could grow on, um, logs of wood. So many fungi have cathartic tastes and it's possible, so I can't say, um, for sure, because I don't know. Um, the, the jock itch species also lives in other places when there are no.
29:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You give it no reason to think they'd be different. Right, right, given.
29:19 Matt Kirshen? I think it was an oyster mushroom that was growing out of our carpet after, a week or so after the toilet was broken at the party. Would that be plausible? It look, it certainly looked oyster like. It was a surprisingly large mushroom that had appeared in our house in a place that shouldn't have been. In this gross place that I lived back in my early twenties.
29:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Matt, when you climbed the tree, you spored out the.
29:40 Matt Kirshen? I know. We shouldn't have put the tree in the toilet either. That was a, that was another mistake.
29:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's the first giveaway right there.
29:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, Matt, give me some more.
29:48 Matt Kirshen? Well, so Gordon goes on to actually ask, uh, I'm curious if there are telltale, uh, signs to differentiate between an edible and poisoned mushroom? And why are some mushrooms poisonous and others not?
30:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a good question. I, you know, because Matt, I mean, why? I mean, if, if, if, I mean, a mushroom is a mushroom. I guess maybe a mushroom is just not a mushroom. They're all different.
30:10 Matt Kirshen? That's always been, you know, I, I've, I've been curious about that because I know there are people, you know, mushroom foraging is a big thing. People foraging for, for cooking reasons and then also people who are foraging for more party reasons. But in either case, the. The warning has always been, well, you better make sure you know what you're getting, because if you pick up the wrong one, then you can be in some real trouble.
30:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, so we have healthy, poisonous, and psychedelic. So, how does the mushroom kingdom divide up?
30:38 Speaker 02 Well, some mushrooms will kill you, so you definitely need to know your mushrooms if you're planning to eat them.
30:46 Speaker 02 But there's no...
30:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But at least they won't kill me by having something grow out of my head. It's just a regular old poison. I'd rather that than be humiliated by having spores come out of my head. I'm sorry.
30:58 Speaker 02 Well, they're pretty deft. Some of them, you will eat them, the deadly poisonous ones, you might eat them, you'll feel pretty bad for a while, then you'll get better, and then a day or so later, you'll drop dead. It's called a false remission.
31:11 Speaker 02 So, they do have their methods. But there's no reliable trait that you can use to distinguish poisonous from non-poisonous across the board, because lots of the poisonous ones are poisonous in different ways, often. And some of them, it's not clear. You know, I had a professor, a professor of history of science, I used to go out mushroom hunting with, he had a big collection of mycological texts, and I asked him once...
31:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, wait, Matt, did you hear that? I had a professor that I once went out, okay?
31:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Did the professor give you a bad grade, and we don't have the professor anymore in the world?
31:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Be careful with your past tense around us here. I don't know what you got going there, but go on. Sorry to interrupt.
31:52 Speaker 02 So, what he said was that I said, are there cases where the same mushroom species is described by different books in radically different ways? And he said that there was a book, a German guidebook, a hundred years old or so that he had, and it described the yellow-staining mushroom, which in English guidebooks says, poisonous, don't eat, skull and crossbones, stay clear. In this German guidebook, it said delicious when fried lightly, but might cause a light coma in those of weak constitution.
32:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Mild coma.
32:25 Speaker 02 I know, I mean, light coma, it sounds quite fun, doesn't it? But, um, not a heavy one, just a light one. And, and it turns out that it depends on your metabolism. Some people have the ability to metabolize these toxins, other people don't. So even if you can tell what mushroom you're eating, in rare cases, ill people will have different reactions to that very same mushroom. It's a bit like plants, you know, there are plants that will kill you, some plants delicious, some plants people can tolerate.
32:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or some people are allergic to tomatoes, you know, that sort of thing, I guess. You know, okay. But that'd be, I guess it's all chemical at the end of the day. But it's not a living thing that's attacking you for having consumed it. All right. I mean, in other words, a poisonous mushroom and you, uh, dying from eating peanuts because you have a peanut allergy. These are different causes, correct?
33:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, because the peanuts won't kill everyone, but a poisonous mushroom would kill everyone.
33:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, an authentically poisonous mushroom.
33:20 Speaker 02 If you ate sufficient quantity, yeah.
33:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah, all right. All right, Matt, we've got time for one more before we head to break and then come to our final segment. So what do you have?
33:29 Matt Kirshen? So Isaac Lambert asks, how much faster is mycelium in plants, fungi and trees than the neurons in our brain? I didn't even know that they were faster than the neurons in our brain.
33:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, oh. I mean, is, and is a neurological analog sensible here?
33:45 Speaker 02 So, um, some fungi produce waves of electrical activity analogous to the impulses that travel in our nerves, which is a fascinating finding, which might really shake up the way we think about the communication and that fungi can, can conduct and the way that they connect other organisms together. And so, given that some fungi do produce impulses, electrical impulses, then when you look at it, you have our nervous systems, which contain, um, long electrically excitable cells. And you have fungal networks, which are networks of long electrically excitable cells. On a superficial level, there are some similarities. The neurons in our bodies conduct impulses or action potentials very much faster than those
34:30 Speaker 02 that you find in some fungal networks. Because remember, not all fungi do this, only some do. So there's a big difference in speed. But then again, we have a need for much faster speeds. We live at a faster pace because we're locomoting, we're moving, our twitchy muscular bodies. So we need that speed, but the fungi may do perfectly well without that.
34:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because we live in the fast lane compared with mushrooms.
34:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Think about that. All right, slip one more in, Matt, before we hit the break.
35:02 Matt Kirshen? Terasina asks, are there any naturally occurring networks of bioluminescent fungi?
35:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Hmm. In fact, I was just notified we have to take the break, but let's hold on to that. And I think they call that a tease, is that right? Bioluminescent chemical pathways. When we return from this break on StarTalk Cosmic Prairie, all about mushrooms.
35:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Hey, it's time to give a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patrons. Elliot Frost, Vincent Crone, and Susanna Lobo. Guys, thank you for all of your support. You know we couldn't do it without you. And for those of you listening who would like your very own Patreon shout out, go to patreon.com/starTalkRadio and support us.
36:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're back.
36:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Earl and Sheldon Drake, the world's experts in mushrooms. And he did that on purpose, like got his PhD and studied it and everything. And so that makes him really useful to people who have their own relationship with mushrooms. And Matt, apparently you grew mushrooms in your toilet.
36:27 Matt Kirshen? Yeah, very.
36:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All I really want to know about that.
36:30 Matt Kirshen? Any mushroom cultivation in my life has been entirely unintentional.
36:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Unintentional?
36:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So what's that last question you had about bioluminescence?
36:40 Matt Kirshen? So are there naturally occurring bioluminescent fungi?
36:45 Speaker 02 Yes, is the answer. There are a number of species of bioluminescent fungi. Some produce mushrooms that bioluminesce, and some produce mycelium that bioluminesce. In fact, the first ever submarine, called the Turtle, which was invented during the American Revolutionary War, fungal bioluminescing bits of wood were used to illuminate the depth gauge of the turtle, known as foxfire, this particular.
37:11 Matt Kirshen? Wow.
37:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Whoa. So we knew about that and how to then exploit it. So we, early on, you're saying we weaponized bioluminescent mushrooms?
37:23 Speaker 02 Well, I don't know how effective the turtle was.
37:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Nonetheless, we weaponized it.
37:29 Speaker 02 I don't know if that's what did it offer the British, but.
37:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow. Okay, very cool. And by the way, this all sounds like the Tree of Life mapping for James Cameron's movie, for Avatar, right? He's trying to come up with exotic life, and he gets all the most exotic life on Earth and makes that the regular life over there, except they have like USB ponytails where they can connect and talk to the animals. All right, is that, do mushrooms have that too? I just want to know how quickly they will in fact become our.
38:06 Matt Kirshen? They seem to be much more versatile than I had any idea about before we started this episode.
38:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Exactly, exactly.
38:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, they do. They grow into plants, and they kind of plug in, if you want to use the electronics metaphor. But the plugging in involves growing into a plant root, growing in and around plant cells. It's a very intimate embrace. And I guess you can think about that in an analogous term to the way that the plugging in happens in Avatar. The fungal networks in Avatar are based on the fungal networks in the real world, of course.
38:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Scientifically, right, because James Cameron, he has many movies, including The Abyss, movies where he has cared about the science of what surrounds his storytelling, and then he puts it in as best as he's able. So keep it coming, Matt.
38:50 Matt Kirshen? All right. Well, Chaz Gencarelli, I hope I'm pronouncing your name even, at least vaguely closely correctly, asks, why are there so many different types of fungi still being discovered each year?
39:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Was that right? You guys are not on top of everything?
39:06 Speaker 02 No, so there's an estimated two to three million species of fungi on the planet, and only about 150,000 have been described. And that means that 6 to 8% of the total number of fungal species on the planet have been described, and that obviously leaves over 90% undescribed. And there's a lot of work for fungal taxonomists to do, just very basic descriptive work, that hasn't been done for a number of reasons. And one of the reasons is because fungi were thought to be plants for a very long time, and so they didn't get a kingdom's worth of attention from biologists. Another reason is that they live hidden lives. They live as mycelial networks, which are buried in whatever they're eating. Mycelium is how fungi feed, so they've got to insinuate themselves within their food to digest it.
39:51 Speaker 02 And what that means is that usually, we don't see so much of what they're doing. So it's harder for us to access.
39:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? See, they're doing that on purpose. They don't want you describing them. I have the privilege of having a species named after me, a species of frog. And so I looked at the specie-ing paper, the paper that makes up the species, and I was astonished how much measurement went on, you know, the ratios of the digits in the feet of the frog versus the hands and eyes separation. All of this gets characterized. And I'm thinking, damn, that must have taken a long time. And if you've got like a gazillion species left, I'm not doing it. Somebody else to do it.
40:45 Matt Kirshen? And there's only so many TV scientists, so how are you going to even come up with all the names?
40:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Exactly, exactly. So it's Dirani Tysoni, a species of leaping frog. And so I was very honored by that.
41:00 Speaker 02 You know, Linnaeus and the taxonomist, and Buffon, the French taxonomist, had this big rivalry, and both would name glamorous species after their patrons, and they would name unglamorous species after each other because they hated each other. The bullfrog was Bouffant Bouffant because Linnaeus thought he'd get one over on Bouffant.
41:20 Speaker 02 So the question is Neil, is your frog, is it a glamorous frog or is it an unglamorous frog? And if so...
41:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, I was just happy that it was a vertebrate, you know? There were like bugs and stuff and slime mold and bacteria. I'm sure those are wanting for names, but at least I got a vertebrate.
41:37 Matt Kirshen? I'm just putting it out there right now. I would be honoured to have a slime named after me. If there's any slime scientist there, I'll take any species of any kingdom.
41:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Noted. The request is out in the mycelium. We'll see who comes back on it. Alright, so Matt.
41:57 Matt Kirshen? So I've saved these two towards the end because I think they're connected and they're a big topic that I think a lot of people are interested in when we talk about mushrooms and particularly talk about magic mushrooms. So Shankar asks, "Is Merlin familiar with Terence McKenna and his views on magic mushrooms? Could magic mushrooms have expanded the human mind, introducing complex language and culture to early humans through psychedelic experience?" And then Robert Slosser asks, "How much of an impact would you speculate has psilocybin had on human evolution?" I think they're playing in a similar world, so I jam those two together.
42:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Interesting, interesting.
42:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, so it's a great question. Without a clear answer, it's very hard to know one way or another when we're going back into prehistory. I mean, it seems clear to me that psychedelics, including psychedelic mushrooms, have had a very big impact on human culture.
42:47 Speaker 02 And for an unknowably long time. And of course, culture and nature are categories that we create, but they aren't separated by an unreachable divide. Anthropogenic climate change is a good example of how cultural developments in humans can affect what we think of as the natural world out there. Terence McKenna's claim with the stoned ape hypothesis was that...
43:10 Speaker 02 Eating magic mushrooms had caused the human brains to increase in size.
43:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or primate brains.
43:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, the pre-human brains. This is a big claim, it's unlikely we'll know either way. There's certainly something to be explained. So between three million years ago and 200,000 years ago, when we're informed that, or we think that, Homo sapiens first arose, the primate brains that led to us increased by four times, so quadrupled in size. They grew to four times the size that they had grown in the previous 60 million years of primate evolution. So it's sometimes called the brain boom. And it's known this took place, the fossil record is clear. The question is why? There are a number of hypotheses. Brains are a really hungry organ. It makes up only, it makes up 2% of our body mass, but takes 20% of our energy at rest.
44:01 Speaker 02 So I think one of the persuasive hypotheses is that the domestication of fire helped, because once you can cook food, then we have to eat less of it, we have to spend less time foraging, we can supply more energy to a hungry organ like the brain. Terence said that this was brought about by the mushrooms. Maybe, maybe a little bit, maybe some, maybe not. I mean, psilocybin's been shown to increase nerve branching in dishes, in culture, but that doesn't necessarily suggest that it would increase brain size over time in real-life humans. There are different versions of the stoned ape hypothesis. Some of them suggest that the big developments
44:44 Speaker 02 like symbolic language and other major milestones in human cognition arose through psychedelics. I think that's more plausible than the brain increase argument.
44:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I don't understand. If it's a temporary condition put on your brain chemistry, how does that make any kind of biological evolution at all?
45:04 Speaker 02 So Terence isn't here to defend it, but what he might say would be that there are epigenetic shifts that would be carried over, or that the...
45:18 Speaker 02 There are cultural changes which then go on to increase our brain size. So if you can imagine a hypothetical situation where someone took magic mushrooms, had the idea to domesticate fire, domesticated fire, had cooked food, and then that allowed our brains to increase in size. So it's very-
45:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're saying this chemical can give you brilliant ideas? Because from what I understand, the brain is pretty, it barely works as it does, right? Now you're gonna toss in some extra chemicals that will alter your perception of reality, and you wanna claim that you're now closer to nature?
45:51 Matt Kirshen? So just, sorry to jump in, is the claim kind of, just, I'm trying to untangle it, but the claim isn't that the mushrooms themselves grow the brain, but the mushrooms expand your horizons that make you then think of doing things that then down the line cause your brain to increase in size, is that?
46:08 Speaker 02 So yeah, so there are different versions of the stendate. And so some of them would say that the mushrooms themselves cause an increase in nerve growth, and that somehow passed on intergenerationally. And some of them, I think the more plausible ones would say that the experience, the radically altered cognitive experience, the unconstrained style of cognition that you have when under the influence of mushrooms, gives you new ideas and invites you to behave in new ways. Possibly synesthetic ways, which might give rise to certain new ways of using language or sounds and associating this with meanings, for example.
46:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Has that happened to you?
46:44 Speaker 02 I have taken-
46:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In other words, have you had a deep thought that you're pretty sure you wouldn't have had had you not exposed yourself to psychedelic mushrooms?
46:54 Speaker 02 Yes, in a word.
46:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes. So you'd recommend everyone do it, then?
46:58 Speaker 02 No, I wouldn't, I wouldn't do that.
47:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Why? If it made you smarter or more insightful in your own work, why not just, you know, have it over the counter at the pharmacy?
47:11 Speaker 02 Well, these experiences can be somewhat unruly. And so you'd want to be sure that you're taking it in the right frame of mind, in the right setting. Some people might have constitutions that would not agree with this kind of radical alteration in their experience, and it'd be wise to stay clear. Other people might need certain kinds of supervision. It's not a straightforward process. So I wouldn't recommend that everyone took them. I think many people can certainly benefit from psychedelic experiences, which is why it's exciting to see this new wave of research into psychedelic compounds pick up steam.
47:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I get it.
47:47 Matt Kirshen? Well, this isn't one of the Patreon questions, but I know there's been quite a bit of research recently. There's been a fair few news stories that have come out of late into how psychedelic treatments might be beneficial for certain types of depression.
48:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, I've seen more articles on that, that's right. So it's one thing to know that it's there and it's psychedelic, but it's quite a whole other exercise to take this chemical and see how it can be absorbed, uptook into civilization in ways that can serve our needs.
48:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, the thing to remember is that these psychedelic compounds, whether from fungi or from plants or from animals, they've been really major parts of traditional human societies for a very, very long time. And so it's not like this is news in the big picture of human existence. It's just this new way that science is finding to describe, quantify, and make sense of these experiences within the framework of modern medical pathology, modern illnesses and treatment programs.
48:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, give me another question.
48:53 Matt Kirshen? One final question then, because this is, Teresina sent in a bunch, and this is the last question that we have. And this is, how can we take advantage of the properties of the fungi network to combat climate change? And can we even?
49:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Good one.
49:06 Matt Kirshen? Possibly a bigger question.
49:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, if the field is in its infancy in a way, there could be so much potential if people are thinking the right way about it. Or you bring people from other disciplines to then help explore what applications might exist that would be invisible to someone who's really close to the problem.
49:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, there's an explosion of interest in fungal applications at the moment, and many of them to do with the ways that fungi can help us adapt to the climate change problem, or problems rather. So there are a number of ways you can think about it. There are fungal medicines that can help humans recover from illnesses, but also can help other animals. The mycologist Paul Stamets has done some amazing work showing that fungal extracts can help bees overcome viral pathogens and so extend the lifetime of bees and beehives, which in turn can help us adapt to changing climates and changing pressures on pollination schemes. There are also fungal materials built using mycelium,
50:13 Speaker 02 which can help disrupt polluting plastics industries, can create sustainable materials for use in buildings or structures, but also for clothing and kind of leather-like material. Fungi in agriculture and forestry, we're never going to not need to grow trees and plants, and fungi are fundamental to all plant life. So are there ways that we can change our behaviour so that the plants and fungi can better support each other in these changing situations that we find ourselves in? There are fungal foods, are there new types of ways that we can grow so proteinaceous delicious meat substitutes using mycelium, which would relieve our dependence on unsustainable meat farming?
50:58 Speaker 02 There are many such examples. There are also ways that the climate change might make things worse in conjunction with the fungi. So... Some fungal pathogens of plants, for example, might be able to move into new areas when climates change, and whole swathes of forests might become vulnerable to new fungal pathogens. It's already happening, killing off huge areas of forests, which would then be decomposed by other types of fungi, and lots of CO2 will then be emitted into the atmosphere. So it's not a straightforward story about fungal saviors. Fungi are startlingly ingenious opportunists, and as things change, they will be able to move into new niches, and maybe sometimes that will be good for us and sometimes less good.
51:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Do you have any parting thoughts for us about as we go forward? Any advice, any bits of wisdom that you have gleaned from this mycelial madness?
51:51 Speaker 02 Well, you know, Neil, one thing I've often thought about, because these fungal networks are astonishing and raise all sorts of questions about how life works. But one of the things that's been interesting recently, and maybe you'll be able to tell me a bit more about it, is that the cosmic web, the very structure of the universe, is now thought to be made up of big filaments of gas and galaxies arranged in clusters linked together in this way. So I would say as below, so above, when I'm looking at these fungal networks and thinking about the structure of the universe. Presumably, you would say as above, so below.
52:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, okay, I'm happy to say that they look alike, right? The cosmic web that they speak of, but a web implies some coherence to what's going on, and in this cosmic web, the distances between nodes is so far that even at the speed of light, an appreciable fraction of the age of the universe has to go by before it could communicate with another, if you want to use the word communicate. So we have galaxy clusters that are so large, they're clearly together.
52:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But it can take the age of the universe for any one galaxy to cross and get to the other side. Well, that's really, that's the slow boat, alright? So, it's not legitimate to think of these as functioning systems. If we're limited by the speed of light, of course, as we expect that they are. Whereas your mycelium and everything else that's terrestrial or smaller, yeah, you can have interconnectivity on a timescale of the lifespan of the organism you're talking about. So, just because things look the same doesn't always mean they are the same. And I would say in this case, that's one of those examples.
53:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I didn't think for a moment that the cosmic web and the oyster mushroom mycelium were the same, but I like...
53:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It would be cool if they were, if the mushrooms, in fact, were communicating with the galaxies. So, Matt, that's... We just give up at that point? We've got no hope as humans in this universe, the day we discover that mushrooms are controlling galaxies. Alright, guys, we gotta call it quits there. So, Merlin, thank you for coming on to StarTalk all the way from London, and we're gonna follow your work, and just in case you discover some new mushroom and you wanna tell everybody about it, you can do it here first. We've got some new fancy mushrooms, got new properties, we'll take that interview. And Matt, always good to have you, dude.
54:25 Matt Kirshen? Oh, it's good to be here, and I'm fascinated. I wanna know more about... I'm getting this book, because I feel like we've not even scratched the surface.
54:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, of course not, of course not. Right, there's not possible for something that complex. Alright, so Merlin, when the mushrooms become our overlords, I think, see, Matt, I think he's practicing for that, so that he won't get...
54:47 Matt Kirshen? I think they might already have...
54:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They'll keep him as their pet, and they'll eat the rest of us, you see? That's how it'll work.
54:52 Speaker 02 I think they've already infected me, which is why I'm here talking to you.
54:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alright, we'll close it out there. This has been StarTalk, and I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. As always, bidding you to keep working out.
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