Maybe Mckenna's musing about mushroom spores traveling through space, and possibly being alien, won't sound so far fetched to a crowd of skeptics in the future.

Imagine a project designed to spread living spores in all directions. The payload could be placed on a rocket, sent into the solar system and then dispersed for maximum effect. I doubt it would happen because of the cost, the time required and the lack of a chance to observe any outcomes of such a scheme.

woodenpingeon,

very interesting addition to the debate.

Having read your comment, I agree that these new findings (or theory if you prefer) about life travelling through the cosmos in the form of dust particles casts a whole new light on Mckenna's ideas.

i mean it's harder for the average person like me to believe that life on earth was enacted by unexplicable mushrooms containing the seeds of human intelligence/conscioussness than believing that life forms (despite their origin) are cosmic travellers jumbing from galaxy to galaxy. Indeed, as Napier says, a similar process could explain how life appeared on earth.

George & Wooden,

There is also a diffreent and more compelling theory where Mckenna says that mushrooms expand our consciousness giving us the knoweldge to take us and our mushroom heirs into the cosmos. So his theory is that mushroom spores are spreading, not by some natural phenomona, but via advanced beings travelling the space ways. And that these advanced beings are smart precisely because the mushrooms spoke through their consciousness.

As crazy as this might sound to a scientifically trained skeptic, there is still no clear way to distinguish between information perceived in higher states of consciousness as arbitrary neuronal firings, or from some place else outside the brain. In all of John Lillys inner explorations, this mind-out-of-brain idea could never be scientifically validated one way or another, and because we are the observers doing the observing, via Godel's incompleteness Theorm there probably will never be a way to make that distinction affirmitively.

Ok George & Wooden, what do you guys think of the whole 2012-timewave-zero-end of-history-thingy??

Scott,

So it's an insurance policy you're proposing? :-)

Chances are the simple bacteria capable of surviving in space are already abundant in the cosmos. Now figuring out a way to perpetuate complex life/intelligence, that is the real challenge.

Life is glorious, intelligence is even better.

"Ok George & Wooden, what do you guys think of the whole 2012-timewave-zero-end of-history-thingy??"

i've lost you. is that when the fury of the singularity will be unleashed or is it something else? i'm vaguely aware of some kind of timeline proposed by vernor vinge [1] (or was it max more who first said that we have thirty years more or less till the critical moment arrives?) but then again my favourite transhumanist website's singularity countdown [2] says we're some 7,602 days (or roughly 21 years) away from the singularity boom.

[1] http://www.transtopia.org/vinge.html
[2] http://www.transtopia.org/

George, so you've never heard about the Mayan Calender End-of History meme that's been around for years now? The date is Dec 21st, 2012. It's the end of the Mayan Calender. It was first picked up again by Jose Arguilles in the the 1980's with the whole new age harmonic convergence thing. He speculated that on this date, is when the earth would come into alignment with the "Galactic Zuvaya" and we would join the Galactic community of evolved consciousness.

Then Terrence Mckenna really took this idea and ran with it for the entire last 10 years of his life. He said that the singularity would occur on this date, that novelty would be become so extreme in the hours before this date, that we would escape history (space-time) altogehter and enter hyperspace.

How much do I believe this? Not sure, I live each day the best I can. :-)

i had no idea. once again, i 'm told i've been living under a stone:-) perhaps the reason lies in my poor schooling - i haven't read any of mckenna's books, not yet anyway.

Geroge,

Who told you that! let me at em! :-)

George, I have read your blog regularly since it's inception, and there is no way you are living under a stone. And besides, traditional schooling is overrated. I like your ideas, so keep shooting them my way!