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From Nature:
The Earth could be scattering the seeds of life throughout our Galaxy. Microbes could ride on specks of dust, powered by the Sun's rays, says William Napier, an astronomer at the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland.
A grain less than a tenth of a millimetre across would still be capable of carrying microscopic life, says Napier. And the pressure of sunlight can quickly blow grains this small out of the solar system. The same force might one day propel spacecraft through the cosmos.
Such a grain could travel about six light years from Earth in 70,000 years - far enough to reach other stars. We could be surrounded by a huge 'biodisk' of frozen organisms floating on grains of rock, says Napier, all of which can wander in and out of our solar system quite easily. "The solar system is as leaky as a sieve," he says.
Earth should spread its seed widest when we pass through a giant molecular cloud, a mass of dusty material from which stars are born. This has happened about five times since life appeared on Earth.
Each time, Napier estimates about three billion trillion microbes passed from Earth into the cloud. The chances of some of these finding their way to an Earth-like planet are quite high, he says. A similar process could even explain how the Earth wound up hosting life in the first place, he adds.
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Maybe McKenna wasn't so far off after all. I do recall reading somewhere that fungal spores were the only living matter on earth that could survive in space although I cannot remember, or find, where. This article seems comfortable with all kinds of life taxying their way through space on rocks.
Regarding Siberia, the shamans there have been munching mushrooms for quite a while from wikipedia:
This mushroom is psychoactive although it is not related to Psilocybe species as many presume, has been used as an entheogen in rituals to communicate to the spirit world, largely in Siberia, with some reported incidents elsewhere in the northern hemisphere
They have even incorporated the fly agaric into their creation myths and from what I can recall spent a reasonable amount of time talking to gods in the form of small mushroom people.
What came first the drugs or the religion?
Not going to be an easy one to answer, it could well vary from place to place. I would put my money on the drugs as it looks like a liking for drugs seems to be more prevelant in nature than a need for religion - stoned koalas, tripping insectivores, felines ripped on catnip and of course.... smoking monkeys! It seems we do not have to be very advanced mentaly to get mashed, religion on the other hand might take a little more brain power.
Could any animal activities be decribed as religion? I'm thinking mainly of elephants. Graveyards and rememberance of the dead, I'm sure in one documentary they stopped during a trek to mark the spot of the death of one of the group the previous year.
And finally, am I talking out of my arse with the last two points? |
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