We will merge with fungi and plants - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14961847
The Tree of Life
The Stoned Ape Theory and a Biologically Appropriate Singularity


I've envisioned a self-sustaining temple of humanity... I've wandered the dream palace of our mind and conversed amicably with three-eyed plant priests in a mycelium-rhizo-mausoleum. Figments of our evolutionary imagination all say the same thing. Humanity will merge with fungi and plants. The mushroom kingdom will be a plantae paradise. Phyto and fungi based energy will transform our way of life.


Your Next Electrical Source: Bionic Mushrooms

Just add some cyanobacteria and mix.


“In this case, our system—this bionic mushroom—produces electricity. By integrating cyanobacteria that can produce electricity, with nanoscale materials capable of collecting the current, we were able to better access the unique properties of both, augment them, and create an entirely new functional bionic system.”

Read more: https://www.popularmechanics.com/scienc ... ectricity/


Plants, Electrified: Scientists Just Grew Conductive Wires Inside Real Roses

Stavrinidou's research team tested countless conductive materials before they came across a winner. Their aim was to get plants to soak up materials that could later harden into wires through the plants xylem, the vein-like system a plant uses to transport water and nutrients. However, most materials (for example, two molecules called pyrrole and aniline) either simply wouldn't uptake, proved toxic when it came down to the hardening phase, or would clog the xylem. In the end, the winning material was a transparent, organic polymer that basically acts like conductive plastic. It's a flavor of a material called PEDOT—short for poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene).

https://www.popularmechanics.com/scienc ... ide-roses/


AS we evolve, humanity will need to stop using entropic energy systems. Instead of death, we will use life to generate fuel. Imagine a living organism that is also a vehicle. Imagine a home that is also a garden? Fungi & plants will give us fuel and food, clean our air, and medicate us. Wow, wow, medicate, RT? Yes, medicate. See, collectively, humanity is schizophrenic.

The symptoms of Schizophrenia may vary depending on the individual and they usually include:

Delusions

Hallucinations and illusions

Lack of emotional expression

Disordered thinking

Inappropriate reactions


^Yep, that's the human family. :lol: Hence why we need to accelerate and expand consciousness. We need a noo-morphic phyto-fungi-cracy, a fully realized living singularity.

Turning algae into diesel fuel

The Department of Energy has said algae holds the potential to produce billions of gallons per year of renewable diesel, gasoline and jet fuels. And that contribution could prove crucial to meeting Renewable Fuel Standards. By 2022, 36 billion gallons of transportation fuels sold in the U.S. must come from blended sources. Only 15 million of those can come from corn-based ethanol, leaving a sizeable gap.

Read more: https://www.techexplorist.com/turning-a ... uel/17651/


Psilocybin Could Be Legal for Therapy by 2021

The psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms could soon be legal to use in a clinical setting

For the first time in U.S. history, a psychedelic drug is on the fast track to getting approved for treating depression by the federal government. Late last month, Compass Therapeutics, a U.K.-based company that researches and develops mental health treatments, announced the FDA granted them what’s called a “breakthrough therapy designation” for their trials into psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms.

Read more: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/cu ... ma-753946/


Information transmission in microbial and fungal communication: from classical to quantum

Bacteria understands that being united they stand, divided they misunderstand. We accumulate major portion of bacterial quorum sensing mechanism (experimentally, theoretically) and quorum sensing regulated behaviors such as extracellular polymeric substances and biofilm development, swarming, virulence together with recently discovered potassium ion-channel mediated communication system. In case of bacterial electrical communication, we still don’t know what are the exact informations bacteria can process through this mechanism. Stochastic fluctuation (noise) can also play a very significant role in biochemical conversation. This ongoing research on bacterial collective behavior is highly significant for our every day life as we are surrounded by bacterial world. Even, the numbers of bacterial cells are ten times more than human cells in our body. Thus different kind of bacterial infections are quite common and can be life threatening. (National Institutes of Health 2007) stated

"Biofilms are clinically important, accounting for over 80 percent of microbial infections in the body. Examples include: infections of oral soft tissues, teeth and dental implants; middle ear; gastrointestinal tract; urogenital tract; airway/lung tissue; eye; urinary tract prostheses; peritoneal membrane and peritoneal dialysis catheters, in-dwelling catheters for hemodialysis and for chronic administration of chemotherapeutic agents (Hickman catheters); cardiac implants such as pacemakers, prosthetic heart valves, ventricular assist devices, and synthetic vascular grafts and stents; prostheses, internal fixation devices, percutaneous sutures; and tracheal and ventilator tubing.”

We also demonstrate some key facts of fungal quorum sensing system, which has a major role in agricultural research and food science and technology. Synthetic bacterial communication can reveal different unseen phenomenon in biochemical communication, which is applicable in biotechnology, biocomputing and medical sciences. Bacterial nanowires, ion-channels and quantum approach (including quantum information) of this conversation game are till now has been explored. Researchers can design their experiments based on the proposed quantum phenomena. We extend the subject matter with a new perspective of quantum synthetic system and aim towards the cellular quantum Turing test, which can be one of the major challenges for future research in this context and hopefully will be able to disclose unfinished symphony of microbial communication.

Read more: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5910326/


:hippy:

-RT
#14961862
I envisioned a future of everyone living in solar powered flying motor homes with replicators. I guess the motor homes could be mostly fungi. Sure, that would be beneficial. :)
#14961947
I look forward to reproduction through spores, doing away with the energy-consuming pre-mating rituals and the physically exhausting acts of copulation itself.

@RhetoricThug you are on to something big ! Congratulations !
#14962000
We already went through our tripped out savage phase, there's no need to backtrack. The singularity isn't likely but we will use weak AI to crack genetics and synthetic biology and in a few hundred years intelligent life will basically be massively engineered nervous systems in vats remotely inhabiting a variety of biorobotic bodies throughout the solar system and beyond. That sounds a lot more interesting than turning into a mushroom.
#14962155
^You're not grasping this. If we can harness the energy of life-giving organisms in a techno-symbiotic system, we'd have clean energy. The truth is, we already merged with plants and fungi. They're a major source of food, clothing, shelter and medicine. Furthermore, minor sources like livestock depend on plants. Not to mention ecological biodiversity, oxygen, climate, and life on planet Earth. Are you familiar with the biosphere? :eh:

The singularity isn't likely but we will use weak AI to crack genetics and synthetic biology and in a few hundred years intelligent life will basically be massively engineered nervous systems in vats remotely inhabiting a variety of biorobotic bodies throughout the solar system and beyond.
Great. We will still need plants and fungi.

Plants, fungi, bacteria = Hidden intelligent systems responsible for life on Planet Earth. We need to intelligently merge with these systems and stop "slash & burn" technological processes.
#14962157
If I understand RT correctly, I agree with him. The idea we can separate ourselves from our biosphere is the wrong approach. We can’t. We are it. We need to better integrate ourselves rather than trying to defeat it.
This is why I even have doubts we can colonize other planets. We would have to change our internal biosphere.
#14962158
One Degree wrote:If I understand RT correctly, I agree with him. The idea we can separate ourselves from our biosphere is the wrong approach. We can’t. We are it. We need to better integrate ourselves rather than trying to defeat it.
This is why I even have doubts we can colonize other planets. We would have to change our internal biosphere.
Yes, and if we're to terraform a planet, we'd need to build a biosphere. People need to understand that cosmic radiation/lack of gravity = reason why we're not sending space probes with people (space travel changes/damages DNA). Robots will need to terraform before humans can settle in. That's why we're building robots. We're colliding particles so we can better understand/manipulate gravity/building blocks of matter, maybe time. AI is for complex systems analysis. All of it requires energy, life generating energy.

I believe plants and fungi hold the key to life-generating energy. We need to find a way to capture it and merge with it. Clean, renewable, energy transformation.

Search for "plants in space" or "lunar greenhouse" you'll get interesting results. Especially on Youtube.

#14988570
Perhaps humans can become an autotrophic species?

Will we ever photosynthesize like plants?

The discovery that some animals have found ways to feed off the Sun’s energy has led to the intriguing idea that humans could one day create solar-powered nourishment.

Humans have to grow, hunt, and gather food, but many living things aren’t so constrained. Plants, algae and many species of bacteria can make their own sustenance through the process of photosynthesis. They harness sunlight to drive the chemical reactions in their bodies that produce sugars. Could humans ever do something similar? Could our bodies ever be altered to feed off the Sun’s energy in the same way as a plant?

As a rule, animals cannot photosynthesise, but all rules have exceptions. The latest potential deviant is the pea aphid, a foe to farmers and a friend to geneticists. Last month, Alain Robichon at the Sophia Agrobiotech Institute in France reported that the aphids use pigments called carotenoids to harvest the sun’s energy and make ATP, a molecule that acts as a store of chemical energy. The aphids are among the very few animals that can make these pigments for themselves, using genes that they stole from fungi. Green aphids (with lots of carotenoids) produced more ATP than white aphids (with almost none), and orange aphids (with intermediate levels) made more ATP in sunlight than in darkness.

Another insect, the Oriental hornet, might have a similar trick, using a different pigment called xanthopterin to convert light to electrical energy. Both insects could be using their ability as a back-up generator, to provide energy when supplies are low or demand is high. But both cases are controversial, and the details of what the pigments are actually doing are unclear. And neither example is true photosynthesis, which also involves transforming carbon dioxide into sugars and other such compounds. Using solar energy is just part of the full conversion process.

There are, however, animals that photosynthesise in the fullest sense of the word. All of them do so by forming partnerships. Corals are the classic example. They’re a collection of hundreds and thousands of soft-bodied animals that resemble sea anemones, living in huge rocky reefs of their own making. They depend upon microscopic algae called dinoflagellates that live in special compartments within their cells. These residents, or endosymbionts, can photosynthesise and they provide the corals with nutrients.

Some sea anemones, clams, sponges, and worms also have photosynthetic endosymbionts, and they’re joined by at least one back-boned example: the spotted salamander. Its green-tinged eggs are loaded with algae, which actually invade the cells of the embryos within, turning them into solar-powered animals. The algae die as the salamanders turn into adults, but not before providing them with a useful source of energy in the earliest parts of their lives.

Sun buddies

Despite these varied examples, photosynthetic symbionts are again the exception rather than the rule. In a classic paper, botanist David Smith and entomologist Elizabeth Bernays explain why: such partnerships are more complicated than they seem. The host needs to “pay” its symbionts in nutrients. They need ways of persuading the symbionts to release their manufactured nutrients, rather than hoarding it for themselves. They need to control the symbionts’ growth, so their populations don’t run amok. They need to transfer their partners to the next generation (corals do it by releasing the symbionts into the surrounding water).

But maybe the seeds of such relationships aren’t as difficult to plant as they might seem. In 2011, Christina Agapakis, a synthetic biologist from the University of California, Los Angeles got baby zebrafish to accept photosynthetic bacteria, simply by injecting them into the fish when they were embryos. As she wrote on her blog, “The biggest surprise was that nothing happened.” The fish cannot photosynthesise, but they didn’t reject the bacteria either. Agapakis’ experiment showed that back-boned animals can, at the very least, tolerate the presence of photosynthetic microbes, or the type that fuels the baby salamanders. And with a little tweak, she even persuaded the bacteria to invade mammalian cells.

There is another option to adding entire symbionts: steal their factories instead. Within the cells of plants and algae, photosynthesis takes place within tiny structures called chloroplasts. Chloroplasts are the remnants of a free-living photosynthetic bacterium that was swallowed by a larger microbe billions of years ago. Unlike many such events, this fateful encounter didn’t end with the engulfed bacterium being digested. Instead, the two cells formed a permanent partnership that fuels the cells of plants and algae to this day. So rather than teaming up with a symbiont, why not cut out the middle-man and take its chloroplasts for yourself?

At least one group of animals has done this – the Elysia sea slugs. These beautiful green creatures graze on algae, and co-opt their chloroplasts for themselves. The pilfered chloroplasts line the slug’s digestive tract, provide it with energy, and allow it to “live as a plant”, as Elysia expert Mary Rumpho describes it. This association is vital to the slug, which cannot reach adulthood without it.

Taking a leaf

It’s still unclear how the slugs maintain and use their chloroplasts. These structures aren’t green USB sticks. You cannot plug them into a fresh host cell and expect them to work normally, because many of the proteins that they use are encoded within the genome of their host cell. These proteins, which number in their hundreds, are made in the cell’s nucleus, and transported into the chloroplast. Elysia’s genome contains at least one algal gene, and while more could lie in wait, it’s unlikely to contain the hundreds necessary to sustain a functional chloroplast.

That’s a mystery for another time. For now, Chris Howe from the University of Cambridge says, “If you wanted to set up a relationship between a chloroplast and a new animal host, you’d need all that extra support machinery. You’d have to put those genes in the host’s genome.” And with hundreds of such genes, turning a human cell into a compatible home for chloroplasts would involve genetic engineering on a vast scale.

And to what end? Even if the symbionts took, even if the controlling genes were successfully added, would this make a difference to us? Probably not. Photosynthesis is a useless ability without some way of exposing yourself to as much of the Sun’s energy as possible. That requires a large surface area, relative to their volume. Plants achieve that with large, horizontal, light-capturing surfaces – leaves. Elysia, the sea slug, being flat and green, looks like a living leaf. It’s also translucent, so light can pass through its tissues to the chloroplasts within.

Humans, on the other hand, are pretty much opaque columns. Even if our skin was riddled with working chloroplasts, they would only manufacture a fraction of the nutrients we need to survive. “Animals need a lot of energy, and moving at all doesn’t really jive well with photosynthesis,” says Agapakis. “If you imagine a person who had to get all of their energy from the sun, they’d have to be very still. Then, they’d need a high surface area, with leafy protrusions. At that point, the person’s a tree.”

And why would be bother? Agapakis points out that by domesticating wild plants, and growing them for food, we have effectively outsourced the process of photosynthesis on a massive scale. Agriculture is a global symbiosis – our version of what the pea aphid does, without the faff of maintaining symbionts in our own bodies. We just plant them in fields.


http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2012090 ... synthesise


“Animals need a lot of energy, and moving at all doesn’t really jive well with photosynthesis,” says Agapakis. “If you imagine a person who had to get all of their energy from the sun, they’d have to be very still. Then, they’d need a high surface area, with leafy protrusions. At that point, the person’s a tree.”

SO this aspect is certainly a drawback or a deal-breaker... Right? WHAT about mind uploading? Typically this notion is a philosophical quibble, one where scholars argue over the nature of consciousness (the hard problem) and whether an uploaded mind is a copy or original. Mind uploading may give us an opportunity to fully explore the observer effect and quantum non-locality. If we can create autotrophic biomimetic androids and successfully and give em a "mind" we can examine if there's non-local interaction/communication between the uploaded mind and donor mind. Furthermore, we could clean our environment by genetically engineering organic robotoids that recycle human waste for energy.

Cheap catalysts turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into fuel

Scientists have long dreamed of mimicking photosynthesis, by using the energy in sunlight to knit together hydrocarbon fuels from carbon dioxide (CO2) and water. Now, a cheap new chemical catalyst has carried out part of that process with record efficiency, using electricity from a solar cell to split CO2 into energy-rich carbon monoxide (CO) and oxygen. The conversion isn’t yet efficient enough to compete with fossil fuels like gasoline. But it could one day lead to methods for making essentially unlimited amounts of liquid fuels from sunlight, water, and CO2, the chief culprit in global warming.

Read more: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06 ... oogle.com/
Great for life on Earth.

Even if mind uploading doesn't allow for non-local communication, traditional means of information transportation may enable us to colonize areas of our solar system. Dyson swarms can capture the energy of our sol and redistribute the energy to photo-stations or resource repeaters which would have to be established via space probes, utilizing orbital properties to gravitationally plot refueling stations in space. Communication relay satellites can be synchronized with refueling stations to provide labor schedules for the micromanagement of space colonies.

Project Cyto-sol
If you can metaphorically entertain this idea, Earth becomes a nucleus for cellular activity in space, and human technologies become organelles. Giving life to an intelligent solar system.
#15267598
Let's loop in and use life systems to solve energy problems.

An Enzyme Can Use Air To Generate Electricity

The research team, led by Dr. Rhys Grinter, Ph.D. student Ashleigh Kropp, and Professor Chris Greening from the Monash University Biomedicine Discovery Institute in Melbourne, Australia, produced and analyzed a hydrogen-consuming enzyme from a common soil bacterium.

Recent work by the team has shown that many bacteria use hydrogen from the atmosphere as an energy source in nutrient-poor environments. "We've known for some time that bacteria can use the trace hydrogen in the air as a source of energy to help them grow and survive, including in Antarctic soils, volcanic craters, and the deep ocean" Professor Greening said. "But we didn't know how they did this, until now."

In this Nature paper, the researchers extracted the enzyme responsible for using atmospheric hydrogen from a bacterium called Mycobacterium smegmatis. They showed that this enzyme, called Huc, turns hydrogen gas into an electrical current. Dr. Grinter notes, "Huc is extraordinarily efficient. Unlike all other known enzymes and chemical catalysts, it even consumes hydrogen below atmospheric levels—as little as 0.00005% of the air we breathe."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05781-7


Project Cyto-Sol is a GO!
#15269966
All this sounds kind of wacky and more emotionally sentimental than based on cold hard calculated engineering decisions.

The reality is that the efficiency of energy collection with plants probably is not going to be that high.

A possible exception for biofuels, but even that area has its issues.

I also find it highly unlikely they're going to find any quantum communication between biological cells.
Some possible exceptions might include the collection of light (ex. begonia pavonina) and neurons in the brain, though even that is a long shot.
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