Comment on Ransomware
Stamets@startrek.website 10 months agoI misread it as omniscient. My bad there.
The root system isn’t omnipresent though. It only exists where life exists. The root system doesn’t permeate in regions of dead space or intergalactic space. If there’s nothing for life to grow on then the network doesn’t exist there.
melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
That’s true, it spans the entire multiverse but only within one galaxy. It’s odd, but it’s cool that the network is so deeply tied to the Milky Way, just in every reality.
It makes me wonder what the network is actually feeding off of. Life? Some sort of nebulous “energy”?
Not something that they need to answer, but it’s just so cool to think about the mystery of it. I love fungi, and I love the mycelial network as this truly cosmic-scale organism living in subspace, holding the multiverse together. It’s beautiful.
Stamets@startrek.website 10 months ago
The network doesn’t seem to feed off of anything but is instead symbiotic in a way, the way that mushrooms are on earth. They’re just a part of the life/death/rebirth cycle.
They’ve never conclusively stated that the network only works in milky way though. Intergalactic space was a no go but they’ve never tried jumping to another galaxy yet. Be crazy if they did in season 5…
melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
Well, the question still remains of “symbiotizing what”? Fungi on earth range from saprophages, which decompose dead matter into nutrients, to mycorrhizae, which form symbiotic relationships with plants which produce nutrients. In either case, they’re feeding off of things, it’s just the source that varies. All living things need to gain energy somehow.
The mycelial network is spooky and probably feeds off something more abstract, since sci-fi and all that. That said, maybe it’s in some sort of symbiotic relationship with the multiverse itself? There’s so much energy in a galaxy, let alone a multiverse worth of galaxies, that it’s not hard to imagine a fungal network feeding off just a tiny fraction of that energy. And interstellar space has relatively low energy, so it makes sense the network wouldn’t build hyphae there.
You’re right that they never said it only works in the Milky Way, I had just assumed that since it peters out at the border of the galaxy that it ends there. And if it resumes in another galaxy, it seems like it would be discontinuous and thus a separate organism. But I suppose if you imagine it as a wholly separate subspace realm, with hyphae that connect out wherever there is sufficient “energy” of whatever sort it feeds off of, it makes sense. That could be a cool twist indeed!
I would give anything to be an astromycologistStamets@startrek.website 10 months ago
Life as a whole or the multiverse itself as you mentioned. The show made that pretty clear in saying that wherever the network goes, life goes, and if the network dies then life itself dies.
Well, in Season 1 we saw a bunch of the calculations and analyzing that was done of the network while they were jumping. The hyphae do seem to connect in a non-linear fashion if they’re able to connect with an alternate dimension. Lorca also did point out that the calculations were showing multiple universes. So I wouldn’t be surprised if it just sort of… bypasses intergalactic space somehow by folding in a way that’s not intuitive to us.
Also nah, don’t need to strike that out buddy. I’d give anything to be one too <3