Paul Stamets has spent decades arguing that fungi are more than organisms. They are, in his framing, planetary infrastructure. A communication network. A bridge between the living and the elemental. His latest Substack piece, published this week, extends that argument further than ever before, straight out into the cosmos.
The headline finding that anchors the piece isn’t new exactly, but its implications are deep. In November 2025, NASA confirmed the detection of tryptophan on the asteroid Bennu, a chunk of primordial rock roughly 500 metres across that predates Earth itself by 100 million years. Tryptophan is an amino acid essential to life as we know it. It is also, critically, the biochemical precursor to tryptamines, the molecular family that includes psilocin, DMT, and serotonin itself.
The chemical step between tryptophan and a tryptamine is decarboxylation: the removal of a CO₂ molecule. That’s it. Which means that if tryptophan is forming abiotically in space, the architecture of psychedelic compounds may not be a quirk of Earth’s evolutionary history. It may be a feature of chemistry itself, wherever it unfolds.
Convergent evolution as a clue
Psilocybin has evolved independently, multiple times, across more than 220 mushroom species distributed across every continent except Antarctica. These are separate evolutionary events, arriving at the same molecule through different genetic routes.
In evolutionary biology, convergent evolution of this kind usually signals selection pressure. Something in the organism’s relationship to its environment makes producing this compound advantageous. The leading hypothesis has long been that psilocybin acts as a deterrent to insects and competing organisms. But convergence at this scale, and across such phylogenetic distance, hints at something more significant. The molecule keeps being invented because, in some sense, it keeps being needed.
DMT and the tryptamine scaffold
Stamets also revisits the astonishing taxonomic spread of DMT, the simplest and perhaps most potent tryptamine. It appears in fungi, plants, and animals: in ayahuasca vines, Acacia bark, Phalaris grasses, the Sonoran Desert toad’s glands (as 5-MeO-DMT), and even certain marine sponges. Kingdoms that diverged hundreds of millions of years ago are all, independently, synthesising variants of the same compound.
The standard explanation is that tryptamine synthesis is biochemically cheap and the scaffold is ancient. That’s true. But Stamets’ point goes further. If the raw material for these compounds is now showing up in asteroid samples from the pre-solar system, we may be talking about a molecular pattern that predates life on Earth entirely.
The consciousness question
Stamets steps beyond mycology and into the study of consciousness itself. His argument is if psilocybin’s precursors exist throughout the cosmos, and if psilocin demonstrably stimulates neuroplasticity, synaptogenesis, and altered states of consciousness here on Earth, then perhaps consciousness is not an anomaly. Perhaps it is an intrinsic property of the universe, expressed wherever chemistry and complexity allow.
This is not a novel philosophical position. It maps closely onto panpsychism, onto the Vedantic concept of Brahman as the substrate of awareness, onto Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere. What’s interesting is that Stamets is now making this argument from asteroid geochemistry rather than from phenomenology alone. The molecules are out there. The architecture already exists. Whether it produces minds elsewhere, we cannot yet know. But the scaffolding is not uniquely ours, that we do know.
He ends with this: “Psilocybin and DMT will be found throughout the cosmos, on other planets. This is the way of being.“
Why this matters for how we think about psychedelics
The psychedelic research boom of the last decade has largely framed psilocybin as a therapeutic tool for depression, PTSD, addiction and end-of-life anxiety.
What Stamets is suggesting is a larger story. One in which these compounds are not anomalies produced by unusual fungi, but expressions of a molecular pattern woven into the structure of matter itself. The therapeutic effects would then be a downstream consequence of something more fundamental: that psilocin resonates with nervous systems because tryptamine chemistry and serotonin chemistry share a common ancestral ground, and that ground may be older than life on this planet.
Maybe we are not just studying a quirky drug. Maybe we are studying the universe’s capacity to produce primordial states of awareness, and what those states might mean.
Further reading
The full Stamets piece is on his Substack. The NASA OSIRIS-REx mission data on Bennu’s organic compounds is published here and worth reading alongside it. For the evolutionary genetics of psilocybin synthesis, see here.
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