SETI in a Parallel Dimension
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - Here and NowWell, it's a complicated argument? There are a number of things you could say about Stropharia Cubensis. First of all, an organism that wastes energy is slated for extinction. Thousands of mushrooms exist on this planet that don't make psilocybin. Stropharia cubensis channels approximately fifteen percent of its metabolic energy into making psilocybin. Why, if mushroom existence doesn't require that for any important purpose? It begins to look to me as though the mushroom may be a kind of technological artefact.
The other thing to notice is that, and this is true of all fungi, they're what is known as primary decomposers.They exist only on dead matter. That's the only karmaless place in the food chain. Vegetarianism compared to that is an orgy of mass slaughter. I guess I have a slight Buddhist bias here. But it seems to me that we've only known about DNA since about 1950, and we're already talking about completely redesigning ourselves based on reprogramming the human genome. So it may be that this is a stage that any intelligent being, species, organism, anywhere in the universe passes through, a phase where it takes control of its own design process. And Stropharia Cubensis looks to me like it's been designed for immortality, information storage, low-speed space flight, an ability to adapt to an incredible variety of environments. So I'm willing to at least entertain the possibility, based on the fact that it talks to you and fills you with alien information, that it may in fact be an artefact of extra-terrestrial origin.
This is how real aliens would do it. They don't arrive in the middle of the night with an interest in your asshole like the stories we're given, that's preposterous. Still less do they have an interest in the electrical grid, or the Gross National Product, or any of that. The problem with an extraterrestrial is to know when you're looking at one. I once visited the world's largest radio telescope in Aracibo, Puerto Rico, and they search for extra- terrestrial life with this thing. It's so large a telescope it's basically a dish suspended in round valley. And underneath the dish there's pasture land, and white cattle, and Stropharia Cubensis... It's like this amazing image of this instrument studying the centre of NGC-3622?, and yet a hundred feet from the main control booth is probably what they're looking for. [laughter]
"The world's largest radio telescope is at Arecibo in Puerto Rico, and within the shadow of that installation, psychedelic mushrooms grow in the fields and the cows graze quietly in the sunshine. It's a marvelous interpenetration of the near and the faraway. I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension, and there the problem is not the absence of communication but an abundance of signals that must be sifted through, because the fact of the matter is that shamans and mystics and seers have been hearing voices and talking to gods and demons since Paleolithic times and probably before. We shouldn't rule out this approach to communication. It seems to me far more likely that an advanced civilization would communicate interdimensionally and telepathically, and the amounts of time available for an intelligent species to have evolved these kinds of communication are vast."
Excerpt from 'The Archaic Revival' by Terence McKenna
posted by Frank Da Silva at 9:24:00 PM
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