Hacker News Reader

For science fiction writers, it is interesting to think about this on an epoch time scale as a means for creating different human-alien like hybrids.

Imagine a trillion alternate earths where some percentage of humans try this but some survive and gain superior evolutionary improvements becoming a human-mushroom hybrid creature.

View on HN

Replace mushroom with virus, and maybe that's what actually happened in real life.

Bacteria too, gut biome is a thing and an interesting symbiosis.

In a sense one can argue that all the processes going on in the body (thinking of e.g. white blood cells) is also a form of symbiosis.

Most people are probably already aware, but that’s likely exactly what happened with mitochondria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis

A better example is the mammalian placenta. That actually was enabled by viral genes, while mitochondria developed from free-living organisms.

Hmm, there was a sci-fi book about this where a billion years into the future plants have developed sentience and humans are given intelligence by symbiotic fungi. Found it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hothouse_(novel)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com