4 ms·
If any life on earth was extraterrestrial, I would bet on fungi. It somehow works too well.
by ramboldio 5y ago
If any life on earth was extraterrestrial, I would bet on fungi. It somehow works too well.
- actusual 5y agoMy grass is in heavy agreement. Mushrooms pop up in my yard within hours of watering.
- ssully 5y agoWhile it's technically not a fungus, I had my first experience with Fuligo septica, or Dog Vomit mold. My wife were gardening in the late evening and went inside as it got dark. About an hour later I let the dogs out and this yellow mass was in the mulch, probably about 6x5" in size. We assumed it was vomit from a racoon or something, but figured it out when it grew back the next day (in two spots this time). I would remove it every morning, but it would grow back for the entire week in different spots in the mulch. It was fascinating, but incredibly gross and kind of creepy!
- larkost 5y agoNote that the mushroom in question has been growing just below the surface for some time. The part we are used to thinking of as a mushroom is, on many species, something like an inflatable flower that is used to release their spores. It is built just below ground over a long time, then inflated at the right moment (rains), and then abandoned while the below-ground main body starts working up the energy to do it all again.
- ASalazarMX 5y agoUnfortunately for them, many are quite tasty.
- ahurmazda 5y agobiggest hope for the survival of human race in the face of an alien onslaught is that we taste like yummy chicken. this way, they will keep us around for a long time
- pbae 5y agoBeing farmed in perpetuity seems like a worse fate than extermination.
- throwawayayay55 5y agoConsider that you're thinking too much of "cow farming" when you think of human farming. No, humans are too useful to just eat! Even for menial tasks. You could think of slavery as a primitive form of human farming, but it's inefficient: being too harshly treated means poor health and mental performance, which means the tasks they can work in are limited. No, the farmers that would be worthy of farming humans would be more astute. It's far more efficient to let a farmed kind live just comfortably enough to be healthy and develop themselves (free range), as long as they (1) are imposed with an element of scarcity that will force them to struggle to be useful in exchange for the scarce element and (2) the farmer is positioned in such a way that they extract value from these useful activities, with no downside. As a bonus, because there's an element of competition for the scarcity, the farmed kind will police themselves (fairly or not), and band together, cooperating to generate an oversized portion of the scarce element at a certain level of increased risk for the leaders of the band - we can call them stakeholders. Winning stakeholders will be rewarded with increased amounts of the scarce element, and losers will be punished with a loss of scarce elements. Extraordinarily successful stakeholders would be rewarded with benefits, and benefit not unlike the farmers - they are to be rewarded for their feats. Those that are successful enough will be invited to travel to the farmers' homeland riding on a giant space phallus...
- acomar 5y agoyou've described wage slavery and class dynamics under capitalism. congratulations. your dystopia is already here.
- fleddr 5y agoJoke's on you. When you eat a mushroom, you eat the fruiting body of the fungus. The mycellium is the real organism, and lives on just fine.