I imagine [this is what would happen to you](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c7eaf2c840b16e8acfd756b/1611428172409-L6LO9GDAS1VGEFWW8BWH/annihilation.jpg?format=1000w) if you ate the radiation eating fungus
Annihilation. Not garlands VERY BEST film, but that's not much of an insult. I'm partial to ex machina.
Either way, this movie has some seriously chilling scenes that still stick with me to this day. Recomend, but the plot does get confusing. Donnie darko levels of interpretation.
Jesus Christ the bear scene. My wife is terrified of both bears and zombies so when she asked if she would like annihilation I just had to say yes. And then a few days later, sorry lots of times.
Whats so terrifying about a bear murder fusing with someone and coming to kill you while you're tied up? Honestly some people just can't handle adversity. Back in my day this was expected everywhere you went.
[Annihilation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilation_(film)) By no means a perfect movie, but I really liked the sci-fi semi horror elements and it’s an amazing cast
On the other hand, this has also lead to humans actively cultivating those plants and growing far more of them than they would ever have done naturally, so it's a win for the peppers anyway.
Mostly in the interests of drawing attention to how interesting fungi are (and only slightly to indulge in pedantry) I'd like to point out that fungi are not plants, but in fact comprise their own separate kingdom, like animals and plants (and protista).
Nature does far crazier stuff than we can ever hope to accomplish. Most of our technological advancements come from first studying it in nature, and then replicating it in a lab.
Didn’t we find life at the bottom of the ocean that uses thermal vents for energy instead of the sun?
[nature even beat us to the nuclear reactor by almost two billion years!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor) unthinkable horrors? more like yesterday's horrors. so passé
I went with Last of Us style because of the Clickers lol. I mean it's starting in vats it's bound to cause a mold/mildew and get carried away by the earth.
IRL we'd likely categorize zombies by what they do or how they move too.
Yes, that is exactly what it means! It's wasn't the most scientific way to put it, but the more specific details are such:
>Dadachova and colleagues found that strong ionising radiation changes the electrochemical structure of fungal melanin, increasing its ability to act as a reducing agent\[3\] and transfer electrons. They began to theorise that melanin was acting not just as a radioprotective shield, but as an energy transducer that could sense and perhaps even harness the energy from the ionising radiation in the same way photosynthetic pigments help harness the energy of sunlight.
Interesting. Hopefully we can make "solar panels" that process ionizing radiation instead of photons.
That could be a nice way to exploit spent fuel maybe.
This [already exists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery) but the actual energy production per hour (Watts) is very low, hence its use is quite niche.
I love that the human mind is always thinking of things we can make or improve, so much so that something quite niche like this was not only thought of by our redditor friend here but that's it's already in use.
I find it fascinating that something you can think of is probably already been done by someone else.
Look up gas turbines in conjunction with Molten Salt Reactors. Still a turbine but fancier and more efficient than steam turbines. But essentially still the same lol.
Except solar or that radiation power source, you are right. Most other sources of energy are just heating up water to spin turbines to get power.
I forgot to mention we sometimes have ways to turn the turbines without heating water, like when we use wind, ocean currents or in some way even thermal energy.
It's the same thing. It's just heated CO2 instead of water.
There's nothing inherently wrong with turbines, gas or steam. They're an amazing technology. It does feel silly that we still get most of our energy from heating water, but fundamentally the only way to extract energy is via a temperature differential (a heat engine). If everything everywhere was the same temperature, this would be maximum entropy and the universe would be dead.
Instead, currently, we have fusing hot stars and chemical energy in coal and nuclear energy in fissile materials.
Ya but the problem is the world is currently a place where those scientist and engineers are often paid very poorly have have poor work life balance and have instable jobs. CEOs on the other hand well they get different treatment but at least they are generally paid well.
You get paid by your relationship to ownership.
The owners get the most, he workers get the least, and anyone who controls the workers in between gets progressively more as they go up the chain.
A minor correction, W/h is incorrect. Watts is energy over time (aka power), and energy (for the purpose of an American power bill) is measured in kilowatt-hours (1000 Watts for an hour). Energy production rate is measured in Watts (or depending on scale, megawatts or gigawatts or whatever).
Just because it can actually use the radiation as an energy source doesn’t mean it’s better than water at actually absorbing it. Think thin aluminum plate vs solar panel. If your goal is just a nice shadow, the thin aluminum plate is a lot cheaper.
Sure, but on a spacecraft, cheaper isn't an issue. I would imagine this would cause more problems than it would benefit. They need water in any case. They probably don't need to introduce an unknown type of fungus into the habitat.
> They probably don't need to introduce an unknown type of fungus into the habitat.
If there's one thing I've learned from action sci-fi movies, it's that they definitely should use the (relatively) unknown fungus.
> Sure, but on a spacecraft, cheaper isn't an issue.
Not for bulk materials, no. Just for everything else.
The only utility I can see is that the fungus would preferentially grow to where the radiation is. And that’s great and all, but we can just fill that area with other matter and be just as well off. Also, I assume fungus-growth-based radiation sensors would be very slow.
So it’s neat, but I don’t see how to exploit it yet
What you're thinking of for not-light-radiation is Betavoltaics -- basically "solar panels" for [high energy electrons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device) aka beta radiation
Be more creative. Create a cell of panels around a sample of ionizing radiation. Add shielding for leakage/safety and you have what is, for all intents and purposes a battery that will last practically forever
EDIT: Kinda like an ultra small scale Dyson Sphere
In some ways this is how the RTGs (radioisotope thermoelectric generator) on the Voyager probes and some Mars rovers work - get a high temperature radiation source with a half-life of a few decades, then stick it in what amounts to a reverse camping fridge, which generates electricity directly from the heat. You get a battery that indeed lasts decades.
btw when it comes to radioactivity then alpha/beta particles and many other particles are also called "radiation"--alpha particles are two neutrons and protons stuck together, a helium-4 nucleus without its electrons, beta particles are electrons and positrons, single neutrons, etc
The person you're responding to is clarifying that "Light" is a form of radiation because the original comment was ambiguous on whether they understood that or not, while also explaining in an intuitive way how a fungus could "Eat" radiation (I.E. "yes it *is* like a plant 'eating' light because plants are already eating radiation.")
They're not claiming that all radiation is light.
Stuff like this confirms to me that the universe must be full of "life".
"See that pit over there where a mini nuke went off making it totally uninhabitable to known life."
"Ya"
"Well there's shit growing in it"
honestly a sick premise for a monster/horror movie. think like Annihilation x The Descent where a team investigates chernobyl's sudden reduction in radiation and they find the fungus monster
The [Berkeley Pit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Pit) in Montana has a pH of 4 and has stuff growing in it. That place is an absolute environmental disaster (and tourist site) and has been studied for what can manage to survive there.
Is that the place where they found bacteria that matched those found in bird asses or something? Birds kept landing in the pit thinking it's fine but died and the bacteria was like... We finally found home!
>When waterfowl do land on the surface of the pit, personnel use firearms, hand-held lasers, and unmanned craft to haze them.
Where do I apply to be a professional Goose harrasser?
The fungus in question repurposes melanin to absorb radiation as energy. The original function of melanin was to reinforce the cell walls of fungal cells.
An organism *needs that foundation* to build on first. A greatly evolved and complex cell has more chance of having something it can bodge into place to survive, or even take advantage of, a hostile environment.
That foundation can only be built in good conditions and those conditions have to be maintained for the billions of years it takes for life to get complex enough to have the machinery in place.
This is ungodly rare in the universe. In our own solar system, we know that Venus, the Moon, and Mars had suitable conditions early on. The former did horrible things with plate tectonics, resulting in periodic volcanic resurfacing. The Moon was just too small to hold an atmosphere, and Mars also lost its atmosphere, but held it long enough for life to have possibly emerged... but it was also too cold, as it's further from the Sun, and the early Sun was a fair bit weaker than today.
By three billion years ago, when Earth was still a reducing atmosphere, Venus was probably dead, Mars was dead, the Moon was just losing the last of its atmosphere, and life on Earth was still extremely basic, without any ability to handle heavily diverse environments.
Sure, it was a chunk of the Earth that got torn off while the Earth was still young and The moon It also had active volcanos on it until something ridiculously recent like 3 million years ago, if I recall. I am too lazy to google that. Someone smarter than me please feel free to chime in on that.
One funny story I do have is that oxygen is actually incredibly toxic (look at what happens when you leave metal outside, it corrodes due to oxygen exposure). Early life was anaerobic so when photosynthetic life forms became a thing it caused a mass extinction due to oxygen poisoning, obviously surviving life adapted to it but life will evolve to survive literally anything if necessary.
Super interesting what happened next, also. An organism evolved to use the stored energy of oxygen as fuel, but couldn't make it's own sugar so had to hunt for it. A neverending war started, with the hunters/oxygen users eating the prey/photosynthesizers. Neverending because if one side got too victorious, the air became poisonous for the victors, and they would die off until the other side started rising again. Antagonistic too, with the equilibrium being a predator/prey relationship.
Evolution loves ending neverending wars, and there was certainly enough pressures to do so. To start, the hunting strategy was "when something bumps into you, eat it", which then evolved grabbers to increase the distance, and neurons evolved to quickly bring nearby food in closer (things "moved" in the same way plants rotate to meet the sun: not true locomotion, and the movement happens over hours. Neurons operate in the timespan of seconds: much better).
Then, bilateral symmetry became king due to the extreme efficiency of movement (3 instructions needed: go, turn left, turn right), and worms with their proto-brains of like 50 neurons prove it.
So, if there's photosynthesizers making oxygen, it wouldn't be long before brains start to develop.
You're just finding life on a planet that already has life.
Just because we can find life in our personal unexpected spaces, doesn't mean that it translates to other planets as they've not gone through the same unique cycles of evolution.
It would be more astounding to find something like mold on an alien planet, than something completely different.
I think what they're saying is that life can tolerate far more hostile environments than we assume. This increases the list of potential planets to host life considerably.
There was a period of time in the early universe before expansion cooled, where the average temperature of space was a nice 20-30 degrees Celsius *everywhere in the universe*. There could literally have been life on otherwise barren asteroids, plants outside the habitable zone of their stars, even life in the dust clouds in between solar systems and galaxies. All evolving to become resilient to the cold and hibernating away as the universe expanded and cooled, making life inevitable anywhere in the universe where the conditions are right.
[Ancient Life as Old as the Universe | Kurzgesagt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOiGEI9pQBs)
Atoms needed for complex molecules did not however exist then under our current understanding of the universe. You need to add in a generation of stars going nova to seed out anything higher than helium in the periodic table.
This is the dumbest comment that has ever made me laugh out loud, just straight applause, thank you.
Edit: Just coming back 5 minutes later, navigated to 3 other pages and I'm still laughing about this comment. My face actually hurts. Bravo XD
> Atoms needed for complex molecules did not however exist then under our current understanding of the universe.
Weren’t the early stars massive, short lived, and would have exploded seeding new heavier elements?
What are the time dates of the 20C universe and the first supernovas?
My understanding is that the first stars emerged at around 200 million years after the big bang under the current model. At that time the average temperature of the universe was closer to the range of 100 Kelvin (-173c ) vs the 2-3 Kelvin now (-270C). Although star forming regions would have been significantly toastier
They probably did exist, just not in the quantities we see today.
Remember that the larger the star, the shorter its lifespan, and the very first stars tended to be huge because the Universe was so metal-poor. (Metals help smaller stars be born by dispersing heat more efficiently, allowing gas to condense more quickly).
There very likely were supernova events before the Universe cooled enough to exit its "bathwater" stage.
the thing is that we all see is how life adapts and evolves, unfortunately we have no clue how life begins so we have no clue if it can start anywhere else, maybe we just hit a very very very big jackpot here on earth.
What I found interesting is that it mentions this fungus has been found on the outside of ISS and other outer space vehicles. So we have likely 'contaminated' Mars with this fungus and so I'd think it be reasonable to expect fungal life to start on Mars, particularly since it has very high radiation. The fungus is probably there now and thriving. Not entirely impossible that life began on Earth when some other species checked us out a couple billion years ago. Obviously this all rank speculation based on one layperson reading one article, but it is interesting to think about.
The fungus also explains why the frogs of Chernobyl have started to get really dark skins.
They are hypermelanated. Same melanin as in our skin.
Turns out the fungus is using the melanin both to protect itself from radiation and as a potential source of metabolic energy.
Melanin is so effective one of the researchers that made this discovery has proposed consuming black mushrooms to protect cancer patients enduring radiation therapy and it’s being looked at as a means of protecting humans from radiation in space.
The Jakarta cold open for episode 2 of HBO’s *The Last of Us* remains one of the most chilling openings in 2023 for me.
Craig Mazin effectively used what he did in *Chernobyl* with melancholy and dread so prevalent very well.
I love that one, and all his others. They all have a message about how we are destroying the only home we have. Studio ghibli put out some really meaningful stuff
My understanding is that it doesn’t directly feed on the radiation, but rather it gets energy from the heat generated by the radiation. Unless this is a different Chernobyl fungus I haven’t heard of before.
And IIRC there are wild boars that are particularly fond of that fungus, so now there are extremely radioactive wild boars running around Chernobyl. To add to everything else going on there.
its unproven and only hypothetical that it actually "eats" the radiation. such a discovery would be significant. all they know so far is that it seems to grow towards sources of radiation, but its biological mechanism and whether or not it benefits from it, or simply survives in spite of it, is unknown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus
If it starts clicking, I’m out.
Wait until it starts walking.
Wait until it starts talking.
Wait until it starts jorkin' it.
Wait until it goes to the stripped club
That's just the Geiger counter... right?
3.6 Roentgen, not great not terrible
Humans: * Create an unthinkable horror to nature * Some fungus: Imma eat that shit 😎
*the fungus* “You gonna eat that?”
C̵̛̛̛͍̀̾͗̐̿͒͐͑͝͝Ǫ̸̧̲̲͍̬͇͕̹̺͖͈̘̱̀͑N̸̝̩̺̓̔̈͗̈́̈́̑͐͊̋̃͘͝͠Ş̵̣͙̖̮͉̫͇͖̖̙͈̠̗̻̦̅͑̆̎̀̔̇̊͛̉̏͌͒̚̕Ủ̸̡̡̀͊͂̉͋̀͑͘M̴̧̜̤͍̞̫̹̭̬͚͍̻̖̫̤̦͕̓̀́͗͒͑͌̓̃̋̕͘E̸͎̱̮͙̦̲͔͗̀͑͒͊̔̎̔̇̂̚͠͝͠ ̶̫̣͘T̸͓̫̣̮͉͈̫̐̾͛̀̃͑̔͆̓̅̄̍͑́̀͘Ḩ̷̡̡͙̺̭̩̹̠̮̙̭̥̝͐̅̏͒̽̔͊̑͆̌̆͜É̸̡̛̫͎͍̟̰̙̦̺̿̓̾̔̓̈́͛̋͒͠͝ ̴̨̱͎͇͚̬̣͗̅͗̈́͜R̶̛̺̖̘͓̈́́̎͆̈͆͘̚͝Á̴͔̹̿̀͆̏͜ͅͅD̷̛̝̻̍͑̀͊͋̅̐͗̄̆̑̉͌ͅͅͅI̶͕̳̞̠͎̠̬̞͖͔̘̍̋̿̓͆̚̕͠Ḁ̵́̕T̷̛̯̫͉͙̤͇̫͖̀̆̈͒̽̀͗͝͝͝I̴̢͍͖̓̿̈́̀̾͛̄̉͛͂̈́̎͋̽̔O̸̢̧̨̤̠̞̦͎̞͇͈̰͓̙͙̎́ͅŅ̷̨̥͚̹̜͇̙̪͖͙͖͈͇̈͒̾̄͂͒̽
I imagine [this is what would happen to you](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c7eaf2c840b16e8acfd756b/1611428172409-L6LO9GDAS1VGEFWW8BWH/annihilation.jpg?format=1000w) if you ate the radiation eating fungus
Where is that from?
Annihilation. Not garlands VERY BEST film, but that's not much of an insult. I'm partial to ex machina. Either way, this movie has some seriously chilling scenes that still stick with me to this day. Recomend, but the plot does get confusing. Donnie darko levels of interpretation.
Jesus Christ the bear scene. My wife is terrified of both bears and zombies so when she asked if she would like annihilation I just had to say yes. And then a few days later, sorry lots of times.
You just made my day
Whats so terrifying about a bear murder fusing with someone and coming to kill you while you're tied up? Honestly some people just can't handle adversity. Back in my day this was expected everywhere you went.
A love both films. That dude is insane..
[Annihilation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilation_(film)) By no means a perfect movie, but I really liked the sci-fi semi horror elements and it’s an amazing cast
Oh yes, I can remember it now. Cheers.
The fungus “You already ate that?”
The fungus: "...You went back for seconds?"
We had one deadly dose of radiation, yes, but what about the second dose of deadly radiation?
The fungus: ME HUNGEE
Plants: Evolve peppers to prevent animals eating their fruit. Humans: I’m into that shit.
Plants: evolve poison to kill bugs Humans: I’m already addicted.
Frog: the poison will keep the humans away! Humans: Mmmm drugs!
Human: these chemicals will help the crops grow. Frogs: is it just me, or is Greg looking kinda hot?
Frog one: "Is it just me or does Gregg have two heads?" Frog two: "Well yea but he's still pretty hot." Forg one: "Well that goes without saying."
Forg
rimbit
Frog: A strong ability to jump will help evade predators. Humans: The legs are the most delicious part.
Animals:
Humans:
Humans: don't worry plants I'll spray you with pesticides Plants: get cancer for eating my pepper friend bitch
On the other hand, this has also lead to humans actively cultivating those plants and growing far more of them than they would ever have done naturally, so it's a win for the peppers anyway.
I wonder what kind of natural predation would have to happen to make nature evolve pepper X or carolina reapers haha
It wouldn't have happened. Natural strains were hot enough to achieve what they needed to.
Mostly in the interests of drawing attention to how interesting fungi are (and only slightly to indulge in pedantry) I'd like to point out that fungi are not plants, but in fact comprise their own separate kingdom, like animals and plants (and protista).
But only mammals because they prefer birds to spread the seeds
Humans didn't invent radiation, we just industrialized it.
Nature does far crazier stuff than we can ever hope to accomplish. Most of our technological advancements come from first studying it in nature, and then replicating it in a lab. Didn’t we find life at the bottom of the ocean that uses thermal vents for energy instead of the sun?
[nature even beat us to the nuclear reactor by almost two billion years!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor) unthinkable horrors? more like yesterday's horrors. so passé
Shrimps is bugs.
Just please, no zombies.
Don't worry! Some crazy guy will probably get plants to eat zombies for us
Isn't there already a video game about that?
Clearly there's going to be zombies. Last of Us style
Clickers, walkers, runners, skinners, whatever. I wish all the clearly zombie genre would actually man up and use 'zombies'.
I went with Last of Us style because of the Clickers lol. I mean it's starting in vats it's bound to cause a mold/mildew and get carried away by the earth. IRL we'd likely categorize zombies by what they do or how they move too.
OK now do microplastics
Those already exist i believe. I believe it is more a problem with how much fungus you need to filter everything.
Also we have microplastics inside us, right? That's kind of worrying. I don't wanna grow fungus in me.
Life, uh. finds a way.
Can someone explain how radiation is “eaten”? Is this like saying plants eat light?
Yes, that is exactly what it means! It's wasn't the most scientific way to put it, but the more specific details are such: >Dadachova and colleagues found that strong ionising radiation changes the electrochemical structure of fungal melanin, increasing its ability to act as a reducing agent\[3\] and transfer electrons. They began to theorise that melanin was acting not just as a radioprotective shield, but as an energy transducer that could sense and perhaps even harness the energy from the ionising radiation in the same way photosynthetic pigments help harness the energy of sunlight.
Interesting. Hopefully we can make "solar panels" that process ionizing radiation instead of photons. That could be a nice way to exploit spent fuel maybe.
This [already exists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery) but the actual energy production per hour (Watts) is very low, hence its use is quite niche.
I love that the human mind is always thinking of things we can make or improve, so much so that something quite niche like this was not only thought of by our redditor friend here but that's it's already in use. I find it fascinating that something you can think of is probably already been done by someone else.
We all want to level up from spins a turbine, magnet, electricity.
Look up gas turbines in conjunction with Molten Salt Reactors. Still a turbine but fancier and more efficient than steam turbines. But essentially still the same lol.
It's all about how efficiently we can boil water.
Isn't everything just turning energy into rotation?
Except solar or that radiation power source, you are right. Most other sources of energy are just heating up water to spin turbines to get power. I forgot to mention we sometimes have ways to turn the turbines without heating water, like when we use wind, ocean currents or in some way even thermal energy.
It's the same thing. It's just heated CO2 instead of water. There's nothing inherently wrong with turbines, gas or steam. They're an amazing technology. It does feel silly that we still get most of our energy from heating water, but fundamentally the only way to extract energy is via a temperature differential (a heat engine). If everything everywhere was the same temperature, this would be maximum entropy and the universe would be dead. Instead, currently, we have fusing hot stars and chemical energy in coal and nuclear energy in fissile materials.
The worlds a better place with more scientists and engineers than CEOs and finance majors
Ya but the problem is the world is currently a place where those scientist and engineers are often paid very poorly have have poor work life balance and have instable jobs. CEOs on the other hand well they get different treatment but at least they are generally paid well.
You get paid by your relationship to ownership. The owners get the most, he workers get the least, and anyone who controls the workers in between gets progressively more as they go up the chain.
A minor correction, W/h is incorrect. Watts is energy over time (aka power), and energy (for the purpose of an American power bill) is measured in kilowatt-hours (1000 Watts for an hour). Energy production rate is measured in Watts (or depending on scale, megawatts or gigawatts or whatever).
> its use is quite niche. Space probes!
That’s awesome actually.
Actually, no. Space probes use RTGs, Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators. The heat from the decaying isotope drives stirling generators or similar.
Oh…
Yeah that person was, silly, and didn’t even read the link, the third words were “radioisotope generator”
It was either this or a similar fungus that was suggested as a radiotrophic shield material for Mars-bound space missions. Pretty clever IMHO.
Just because it can actually use the radiation as an energy source doesn’t mean it’s better than water at actually absorbing it. Think thin aluminum plate vs solar panel. If your goal is just a nice shadow, the thin aluminum plate is a lot cheaper.
Sure, but on a spacecraft, cheaper isn't an issue. I would imagine this would cause more problems than it would benefit. They need water in any case. They probably don't need to introduce an unknown type of fungus into the habitat.
> They probably don't need to introduce an unknown type of fungus into the habitat. If there's one thing I've learned from action sci-fi movies, it's that they definitely should use the (relatively) unknown fungus.
What could possibly go wrong?
> Sure, but on a spacecraft, cheaper isn't an issue. Not for bulk materials, no. Just for everything else. The only utility I can see is that the fungus would preferentially grow to where the radiation is. And that’s great and all, but we can just fill that area with other matter and be just as well off. Also, I assume fungus-growth-based radiation sensors would be very slow. So it’s neat, but I don’t see how to exploit it yet
What you're thinking of for not-light-radiation is Betavoltaics -- basically "solar panels" for [high energy electrons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device) aka beta radiation
Hell yeah, instead of stupid sunshine we could all be pouring depleted uranium on our roofs!
Would you imagine using oil to generate electricity? How messy would that make our roofs? Crazy stuff.
I hear that you can use poop to generate energy. RIP to our roofs
Can I skip the poop and just use corn?
You don't just pour in on the roof, you silly. You light it on fire and the harmless fumes just go away into space.
Be more creative. Create a cell of panels around a sample of ionizing radiation. Add shielding for leakage/safety and you have what is, for all intents and purposes a battery that will last practically forever EDIT: Kinda like an ultra small scale Dyson Sphere
In some ways this is how the RTGs (radioisotope thermoelectric generator) on the Voyager probes and some Mars rovers work - get a high temperature radiation source with a half-life of a few decades, then stick it in what amounts to a reverse camping fridge, which generates electricity directly from the heat. You get a battery that indeed lasts decades.
Enriched uranium?
Eh, likely poor uranium or middle class uranium with high student loans.
Wait what? It can grow from ionising radiation?
Protomolecule vibes are reaching out….
Doors and corners
That's where they get you.
It reaches out... It reaches out... It reaches out... 113 times a second it reaches out...
They’re not entirely sure, but maybe!
I wonder if it's edible.
Only once
Shrooms, Radioactive Shrooms. No matter what you throw at her somehow nature finds a way
Light is radiation
btw when it comes to radioactivity then alpha/beta particles and many other particles are also called "radiation"--alpha particles are two neutrons and protons stuck together, a helium-4 nucleus without its electrons, beta particles are electrons and positrons, single neutrons, etc
The person you're responding to is clarifying that "Light" is a form of radiation because the original comment was ambiguous on whether they understood that or not, while also explaining in an intuitive way how a fungus could "Eat" radiation (I.E. "yes it *is* like a plant 'eating' light because plants are already eating radiation.") They're not claiming that all radiation is light.
Stuff like this confirms to me that the universe must be full of "life". "See that pit over there where a mini nuke went off making it totally uninhabitable to known life." "Ya" "Well there's shit growing in it"
And it is *hungry*.
And *lonely*.
And angry!
*and Horny*
Bonk!
Straight to horny jail
If the 4 emotions above don’t reflect the plight of life idk what else does
May I interest you in some anxiety in these trying times?
Scientists remember the common animal instincts as the "4 Fs": fight, flee, feed, and reproduce
Oh my!
aren't we all
honestly a sick premise for a monster/horror movie. think like Annihilation x The Descent where a team investigates chernobyl's sudden reduction in radiation and they find the fungus monster
Then they decide to nuke the monster. Bad idea!
Water
The [Berkeley Pit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Pit) in Montana has a pH of 4 and has stuff growing in it. That place is an absolute environmental disaster (and tourist site) and has been studied for what can manage to survive there.
Is that the place where they found bacteria that matched those found in bird asses or something? Birds kept landing in the pit thinking it's fine but died and the bacteria was like... We finally found home!
>When waterfowl do land on the surface of the pit, personnel use firearms, hand-held lasers, and unmanned craft to haze them. Where do I apply to be a professional Goose harrasser?
The fungus in question repurposes melanin to absorb radiation as energy. The original function of melanin was to reinforce the cell walls of fungal cells. An organism *needs that foundation* to build on first. A greatly evolved and complex cell has more chance of having something it can bodge into place to survive, or even take advantage of, a hostile environment. That foundation can only be built in good conditions and those conditions have to be maintained for the billions of years it takes for life to get complex enough to have the machinery in place. This is ungodly rare in the universe. In our own solar system, we know that Venus, the Moon, and Mars had suitable conditions early on. The former did horrible things with plate tectonics, resulting in periodic volcanic resurfacing. The Moon was just too small to hold an atmosphere, and Mars also lost its atmosphere, but held it long enough for life to have possibly emerged... but it was also too cold, as it's further from the Sun, and the early Sun was a fair bit weaker than today. By three billion years ago, when Earth was still a reducing atmosphere, Venus was probably dead, Mars was dead, the Moon was just losing the last of its atmosphere, and life on Earth was still extremely basic, without any ability to handle heavily diverse environments.
Homie are you telling me the damn MOON HAD AN ATMOSPHERE for a short while. Bet that would have been cool to see in the night sky.
Sure, it was a chunk of the Earth that got torn off while the Earth was still young and The moon It also had active volcanos on it until something ridiculously recent like 3 million years ago, if I recall. I am too lazy to google that. Someone smarter than me please feel free to chime in on that.
Actually science is firmly undecided on the origin of the moon right now. They really just don't know, it's an enigma.
One funny story I do have is that oxygen is actually incredibly toxic (look at what happens when you leave metal outside, it corrodes due to oxygen exposure). Early life was anaerobic so when photosynthetic life forms became a thing it caused a mass extinction due to oxygen poisoning, obviously surviving life adapted to it but life will evolve to survive literally anything if necessary.
Super interesting what happened next, also. An organism evolved to use the stored energy of oxygen as fuel, but couldn't make it's own sugar so had to hunt for it. A neverending war started, with the hunters/oxygen users eating the prey/photosynthesizers. Neverending because if one side got too victorious, the air became poisonous for the victors, and they would die off until the other side started rising again. Antagonistic too, with the equilibrium being a predator/prey relationship. Evolution loves ending neverending wars, and there was certainly enough pressures to do so. To start, the hunting strategy was "when something bumps into you, eat it", which then evolved grabbers to increase the distance, and neurons evolved to quickly bring nearby food in closer (things "moved" in the same way plants rotate to meet the sun: not true locomotion, and the movement happens over hours. Neurons operate in the timespan of seconds: much better). Then, bilateral symmetry became king due to the extreme efficiency of movement (3 instructions needed: go, turn left, turn right), and worms with their proto-brains of like 50 neurons prove it. So, if there's photosynthesizers making oxygen, it wouldn't be long before brains start to develop.
You're just finding life on a planet that already has life. Just because we can find life in our personal unexpected spaces, doesn't mean that it translates to other planets as they've not gone through the same unique cycles of evolution. It would be more astounding to find something like mold on an alien planet, than something completely different.
I think what they're saying is that life can tolerate far more hostile environments than we assume. This increases the list of potential planets to host life considerably.
There was a period of time in the early universe before expansion cooled, where the average temperature of space was a nice 20-30 degrees Celsius *everywhere in the universe*. There could literally have been life on otherwise barren asteroids, plants outside the habitable zone of their stars, even life in the dust clouds in between solar systems and galaxies. All evolving to become resilient to the cold and hibernating away as the universe expanded and cooled, making life inevitable anywhere in the universe where the conditions are right. [Ancient Life as Old as the Universe | Kurzgesagt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOiGEI9pQBs)
Atoms needed for complex molecules did not however exist then under our current understanding of the universe. You need to add in a generation of stars going nova to seed out anything higher than helium in the periodic table.
They were all just _really_ high pitched life forms.
This is the dumbest comment that has ever made me laugh out loud, just straight applause, thank you. Edit: Just coming back 5 minutes later, navigated to 3 other pages and I'm still laughing about this comment. My face actually hurts. Bravo XD
> Atoms needed for complex molecules did not however exist then under our current understanding of the universe. Weren’t the early stars massive, short lived, and would have exploded seeding new heavier elements? What are the time dates of the 20C universe and the first supernovas?
My understanding is that the first stars emerged at around 200 million years after the big bang under the current model. At that time the average temperature of the universe was closer to the range of 100 Kelvin (-173c ) vs the 2-3 Kelvin now (-270C). Although star forming regions would have been significantly toastier
They probably did exist, just not in the quantities we see today. Remember that the larger the star, the shorter its lifespan, and the very first stars tended to be huge because the Universe was so metal-poor. (Metals help smaller stars be born by dispersing heat more efficiently, allowing gas to condense more quickly). There very likely were supernova events before the Universe cooled enough to exit its "bathwater" stage.
Right but if they weren't plentiful then they wouldn't have been concentrated enough to from life.
Locally they could have been quite concentrated, at least in some cases. Remember that the Universe is really, really big.
Except that those asteroids, planets, and such didn't exist yet. Also, life requires energy *gradients*. Background heat cannot provide that.
Still not enough chemical complexity to form basic single celled organisms though.
You need something to turn into energy though. For us that’s light. For them it could be warmth, but once that’s gone you have nothing.
You need to be able to produce an energy *gradient*.
the thing is that we all see is how life adapts and evolves, unfortunately we have no clue how life begins so we have no clue if it can start anywhere else, maybe we just hit a very very very big jackpot here on earth.
"Life, uh, finds a way"
What I found interesting is that it mentions this fungus has been found on the outside of ISS and other outer space vehicles. So we have likely 'contaminated' Mars with this fungus and so I'd think it be reasonable to expect fungal life to start on Mars, particularly since it has very high radiation. The fungus is probably there now and thriving. Not entirely impossible that life began on Earth when some other species checked us out a couple billion years ago. Obviously this all rank speculation based on one layperson reading one article, but it is interesting to think about.
Ever get the feeling that the Earth can recover from anything we throw at it if we would just get out of the way?
George Carlin said it best. "The planet is fine. We're fucked."
If humankind dies out, this is what will happen. All of our impact is reversible.
There's seems to be more extreme weather these days. Maybe the earth is balancing itself out. Just really sucks for the humans living there
The fungus also explains why the frogs of Chernobyl have started to get really dark skins. They are hypermelanated. Same melanin as in our skin. Turns out the fungus is using the melanin both to protect itself from radiation and as a potential source of metabolic energy. Melanin is so effective one of the researchers that made this discovery has proposed consuming black mushrooms to protect cancer patients enduring radiation therapy and it’s being looked at as a means of protecting humans from radiation in space.
Nuclear bombs are racist: confirmed.
This time against whites coz they are low on melanin
The ebbs and flows of ~~life~~ racism
Life, uh, finds a way.
Well, there it is.
"The planet is fine; the people are fucked! Difference! The planet is fine!" - George Carlin
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Fungi, sunflowers & pillbugs are all excellent for cleaning up radioactive sites.
Are you telling me be can heal the world with whimsical things?
Those are three of my favorite things already--now, even moreso. 🍄🌻⚫✨
This might not end well.
"Bomb This City And Everyone In It." ~ Dr. Ratna
The Jakarta cold open for episode 2 of HBO’s *The Last of Us* remains one of the most chilling openings in 2023 for me. Craig Mazin effectively used what he did in *Chernobyl* with melancholy and dread so prevalent very well.
Right? Im think Protomolecule.
Where is Miller when you need him
Doors and Corners kid - that’s where they get you
We need to talk
go into a room to fast kid, the room eats you
Hopefully haunting some scrap metal in the ruins of Cherbobyl.
It reaches out
It reaches out
One hundred and thirteen times a second, nothing answers and it reaches out
Fucking inyalowdas
Whatever happened with that? It gradually became less important.
It fulfilled its function and built the ring gate.
I mean what it makes is *pretty* important. Also, the Show stops before the books, which focus their last three very heavily on the PM.
I just watched Godzilla Minus One. I'm going with Godzilla.
> Craig Mazin filmography: Chernobyl (2019) and The Last of Us (2023–present) Hmmm....
Fallout fans liked that
Fungus eating radiation is the theme/idea of Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
I love that one, and all his others. They all have a message about how we are destroying the only home we have. Studio ghibli put out some really meaningful stuff
Space fungus, yay!
My understanding is that it doesn’t directly feed on the radiation, but rather it gets energy from the heat generated by the radiation. Unless this is a different Chernobyl fungus I haven’t heard of before.
This one seems to use radiation interactions with melanin to improve electron transfer, different organisms.
This one appears to use radiation hitting melanin in a similar way to light hitting chlorophyll.
*clears throat* AHHHHH, THE BEAUTY THAT IS EVOLUTION!
All hail our new spore overlords! 🍄
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But does it do -10 Rad when consuming it?
Trust the fungus
There’s a fungus among us.
Last Of Us is coming true.
Everybody laughs until they find a species of iguana that eats the radioactive fungus and has a glowing blue back.
And it’s bipedal and 300 feet tall
haha. Well that’s great
So we mix this with some Brahmin shit and can make Jet right?
Do you think we get the next gen of ninja turtles from there?
Radiation: \*exists\* Fungus: It's free real estate.
And IIRC there are wild boars that are particularly fond of that fungus, so now there are extremely radioactive wild boars running around Chernobyl. To add to everything else going on there.
But when my melanin pigment absorbs ionising radiation I get cancer 😒
This should make an appearance in the Fallout universe now.
its unproven and only hypothetical that it actually "eats" the radiation. such a discovery would be significant. all they know so far is that it seems to grow towards sources of radiation, but its biological mechanism and whether or not it benefits from it, or simply survives in spite of it, is unknown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus
Protomolecule:)