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Subterranean fungi networks more than 100 quadrillion km in length

Subterranean fungi networks more than 100 quadrillion km in length

tosh

Comments (39)

  • TrackerFF
    Say you have a filament that's 1 µm in diameter, and 1 meter long. You want to fill up a 1m^3 (1m W x 1m H x 1m L) space with these, how many of these can you place in such a space? Over a trillion! And thus, the combined km length of these will also be over a billion km. At such small scales things can become very long when summed up.
  • tromp
    Meanwhile, a single human cell's DNA stretches for about 2 meter, one human's DNA stretches for about 2 x 5.4 trillion meter, and all living human DNA for a whopping 8.6 x 10^22 meters, nearly a thousand times longer than the fungi networks...[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1gfq6k2/how...
  • rglover
    Learning that trees use mycelium like their own internet to communicate about where resources are was my first real..."oh man, I feel small" moment. Even crazier to think about when the scale of the network starts to get quantified.
  • mkl
    100×10^12 km is about 10.6 light years. There are about 16 other stars closer to the sun than that. It's a bit like a human body containing blood vessels with total length greater than twice the Earth's circumference.
  • N_Lens
    I believe Planet will talk to us if we are willing to listen. These fungal stalks behave as multistate relays: taken together, the neural net connectivity must be staggering. Can a planet be said to have achieved sentience?- Lady Deirdre Skye, Planet Dreams, Alpha Centauri
  • animalfarm
  • kolinko
    So around the length of the coastline of UK.
  • xvxvx
    I read to the part where they used machine learning to get the results and lost all faith in this being accurate at all.
  • jakzurr
    The article is still pretty cool, even though the discussion brings up some issues with their arithmetic.
  • reliablereason
    If you have a number that is 1000^90000000 that number is larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
  • contingencies
    Interesting how deeply east coast Australia is colored. I live in Sydney, a city of 5.6 million humans, and yet my yard apparently has at least the following fungi I can identify to species level: Aseroe rubra (alien thing with tendrils), Astraeus hygrometricus, Cladia aggregata, Coprinellus disseminatus, Coprinellus micaceus, Cruentomycena viscidocruenta, Flavoparmelia caperata, Heterodea muelleri, Hypholoma fasciculare, Leratiomyces ceres, Mycena tenerrima, Myriostoma australianum, Omphalotus nidiformis (glows in the dark), Panellus luxfilamentus, Satyrus rubicundus (looks like a red penis), Scleroderma cepa, Scleroderma citrinum, Trametes coccinea, Trametes versicolor, Usnea hirta.
  • metalman
    there was other work done on nemetodes, that are all over the planet, in glaciers, deap ocean, in rock far underground, etc, where someone did a representation of the earth, but with everything but the nemetodes removed, my speculation is that a large part of nemetode and mycylium networks, overlap.
  • waterTanuki
    The map looks off. No way the American Southwest has 3 meters per cm cubed of fungal density in such an arid region. Plenty of desert.
  • WalterGR
    > First ever global mapping of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi shows scale of hyphal systems that sustain plant lifeRelated and recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48209905 - "Mycorrhizal Fungi, Nature's Key to Plant Survival and Success" (pacifichorticulture.org)153 points | 26 days ago | 50 comments
  • aaron695
    [dead]