If Earth Is Ever Hit By An Asteroid, Only Mushrooms Can Save Us From Going Extinct

Asteroids may just be rocks that have large orbits around the Sun. And they're fine when they stay there. But when they come crashing down to Earth, they can cause a lot of damage. And it seems like the only thing that could stop us being wiped out is some fungus.

At least, that's according to science journalist and TIME editor Bryan Walsh.

Images courtesy: Reuters

In a new book titled 'End Times', Walsh makes the argument that when the world comes crashing down around us, it's the humble mushroom that will be our saviour. How is that? Well consider this.

Scientists know that a gigantic asteroid crashed into the Earth's surface about 66 million years ago, with a shockwave 6,500 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Of course, dinosaurs in the impact region dropped dead on the spot. But the Earth isn't all that tiny, so what kickstarted the extinction event that killed all of them across the globe?

Well, scientists have long-theorized that there were other effects of that impact. The shockwave would have thrown up massive tsunamis to pummel coastlines, powerful winds that flattened everything in their path and, more importantly, massive dust clouds. That dust, would have settled in our atmosphere for at least two years, blocking both warmth from the sun and the light.

Because of that, photosynthesis in plants would have ground to a halt, and herbivores starving to death, the carnivores preying on them following shortly after. It's very easy for the same thing to happen on Earth today, especially since we don't yet have a system ready to destroy an asteroid heading for us, though NASA is working on it. So we instead have to adapt to survive.

That's where Walsh says mushrooms will become invaluable, whether that's in the case of an asteroid impact, supervolcano eruption, or nuclear war. All of these instances would result in no sunlight for photosynthesis. Of course, mushrooms don't need sunlight to grow and flourish, so we'd have to move towards cultivating them directly in order to survive.

In fact, Walsh's calculations say a 3-foot-long, 4-inch-wide log with fungus on it should yield about 2.2 pounds of mushrooms in four years. And that's of course using the trees and plants already dying around us.

"While we're using the wood to grow mushrooms, we could use the dead trees' leaves, too," civil engineer David Denkenberger said in a similar apocalypse survival book from back in 2014. "The ground-up leaves could be made into tea to provide missing nutrients like vitamin C, or fed to ruminant animals like cows or rats."

Not just mushrooms, Walsh says we'd also have to adopt other eating habits for things we can easily cultivate, like insects and even rats. After all rats are also capable of digesting cellulose, the sugar in plants and trees. So we'd be fattening rats up on plants and then eating them for the meat.

It would also help of course that rats reproduce rapidly and don't typically need a lot of sunlight. Insects meanwhile can also be easily cultivated and are a good source of protein. "Beetles can feast on dead wood, and humans can feast on beetles," Walsh writes.