How Mushrooms Could Hold the Key to Our Long-Term Survival as a Species | Hacker News Reader

How Mushrooms Could Hold the Key to Our Long-Term Survival as a Species

motherboard.vice.com

103 pointsDiabloD323 comments

Interesting. The idea that mushrooms could purify pollutants seems reminiscent of this movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087544/

Or this movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108255/

But the only way to save Dinohatten is by transporting it to our own dimension!

Fungi can purify pollutants, but they can also emit mycotoxins that are extremely harmful to us. So you may have to wear a hazmat suit while the purification is taking place...

Yeah, that sounds just like Nausicaa. The manga it's based on (also by Miyazaki) is one of my all-time favorites.

While the vice article suggests that mushrooms will make food for themselves or other organisms from the pollutants they pick up, not all compounds are broken down in mushrooms. For example it's suggested not to eat mushrooms from old apple orchards as they may have a higher lead content.

It still may have a practical application to treat soil in an area (as long as you harvest the mushrooms) but not all of the compounds drawn up by mushrooms are broken down.

http://www.fungimag.com/winter-2010-articles/shavit-morels.p...

There have been some other studies where mushroom mounds were created on the boundaries of farms to help collect phosphates and nitrates in water runoff with some promising success. Couldn't find the specific study I was thinking of with a quick search, will update this comment if I find it.

The mushrooms aren't necessarily being used to break down the compounds, so much as to facilitate their sequestration. You can then harvest and destroy the mushrooms and have clean soil.

> destroy the mushrooms

What are some ways this would be done without spreading the pollutants elsewhere?

Pollutants can be re-treated to be less harmful, or incinerated, or simply dispersed over a large enough surface/volume so that they would not be considered pollutants anymore at low enough concentrations.

I'm sympathetic to the argument (and I enjoy Paul Staments) but this article is a poorly-written regurgitation of Stamets' ideas, which adds little value and makes some overly strong unsourced statements along the way.

Which statements are too strong?

You can also make or rather grow bio-degradeable packaging solutions from Mycelium. We can look forward to many applications from funghi - got to support this

It's almost like nature has code behind it we can fork and iterate upon

Love this. If anyone is interested in getting into Mycology I help work on an open source project mushroomobserver.org

We're always looking for fungi loving techies to help us out: https://github.com/MushroomObserver/mushroom-observer

This was a kickstarter commercial. Seems CNN didn't purchase Vice's integrity when they bought everything.

The video in TFA is so worth the 18-and-change minutes it takes to watch.

It would be nice if you could include a "why" for statements like that.

Is it by eating them? I like mushrooms.

Would this article make the front-page if the word mushroom was replaced with mycelium or fungus which removed the hope of legitimizing psychedelics? I doubt it, even in the article they extol the virtues of "magical" mushrooms:

> While it’s also being researched for uses in less cosmic concerns like breaking addiction and treating cancer, psilocybin’s third-eye-opening properties aren’t superficial. Some theories argue that modern human intelligence itself was borne of consumption of the stuff. Magic mushrooms are something about which Stamets is (naturally) an expert...

OTOH, maybe it's good to have the word mushroom in the title since it also signals to the rest of us that it's probably going to be an article by and for fans of psilocybin.

I doubt anyone read the title, and then upvoted, because they assumed it was an article about how psychedelics held the key to humanity's survival.

How many pot-heads have you known who would chew your ear off about hemp? It's innocence by association.

I think that very few people clicked this because they thought that psychedelic mushrooms could somehow solve the problems threatening the human race (e.g. climate change, overpopulation, water shortages, nuclear weapons, etc.)

My bet would be that they thought what the title wanted them to think: "I wonder how mushrooms are good to feed humans and/or save the ecosystem?"

Just because some readers of HN use drugs doesn't mean they're any less science-y or that they're idiotic, blind fans of psychedelic mushrooms.

If the article wasn't in Vice, if the main subject of the article didn't credit magic mushrooms for his world view, if the author of the article didn't reference insane theories of evolution happening because primates started tripping on mushrooms, if the author didn't extol the virtues of psilocybin, I would probably agree with you.

As it is the article clearly has a bias towards mushrooms because of the psychedelic properties some of them possess.

If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com