Ok, so it’s downright phenomenal that lichens don’t need spacesuits for interstellar travel. Crazy even. Wildcrafting edible organic lichen outside your spacecraft may revolutionize our future travel gardens and meals, but that’s not what really gets my synapses firing. A recent article in The Register expands upon the details, Lichens love life in space.

You see, it’s already well-known that spores can not only survive space travel, but also withstand the extreme conditions of entering the atmosphere. Terence Mckenna often elaborated upon Francis Crick and his Theory of Panspermia to explain how the psychedelic mushroom is an alien intelligence from outer space:

I think in a hundred years… they will think it quite silly that people once thought that spores could not be blown from one star system to another by cosmic radiation pressure. As far as the role of the psilocybin mushroom, or its relationship to us and to intelligence, this is something that we need to consider. It really isn’t important that I claim that it’s an extraterrestrial, what we need is a body of people claiming this, or a body of people denying it, because what we’re talking about is the experience of the mushroom. Few people are in a position to judge its extraterrestrial potential because few people in the orthodox sciences have ever experienced the full spectrum of psychedelic effects that is unleashed. One cannot find out whether or not there’s an extraterrestrial intelligence inside the mushroom unless one is willing to take the mushroom. Read More.

Well this got me thinking about the work of Dr. Alexander Shulgin, who often uses lichens as the raw source material for many of his psychoactive compounds.

It’s just a little weird isn’t it? The living matter on Earth that can withstand interstellar travel also sports a proclivity towards pychoactive constituents that expand consciousness in mammals.