The Chernobyl mushroom for space.

The Chernobyl mushroom is a black fungus, although in the image we see it more greenish in color and that it thrives in extremely radioactive environments, in the news they make it seem like it eats radioactivity, but it is not that it eats radiation, it does not use it as food, but it does use it as a source of energy, and this is very interesting.

It does a process similar to photosynthesis called radio synthesis with radioactivity, this makes it, of course, one of the most resistant organisms known to radioactivity, even in space, this fungus was identified in 1991 by Ukrainian scientists, it was on the walls of reactor number four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, where you already know the story, the explosion released a brutal amount of lethal radiation.

This mushroom and a few others, they found 37, but this was the one that took the cake, the boss, the goat, this mushroom, instead of dying and instead of looking for quiet places to grow, what it did was go to the most contaminated areas to precisely use that radioactivity as a source of energy, what it did was that it became the most abundant mushroom in that area, in the most dangerous area, in fact, it came to coexist with levels of radioactivity, thousands of times higher than normal.

The trick of this mushroom is to use melanin, which curiously is the same substance that gives color to human skin, because melanin gives an advantage in hostile environments in a similar way to how melanin protects our skin from the sun, it is not that it eats radiation, it is that it uses it and melanin acts as a shield and energetic antenna, melanin serves so that the fungus can better absorb ionizing radiation, such as gamma rays or beta rays, the hulk mushroom, we should call it more than anything.

This Hulk mushroom is tremendous, they have even tested it in space and it withstands radioactivity or cosmic rays and grows wonderfully well. Researchers are studying the possibility of using it as a living shield against cosmic radiation, emissions to Mars or the Moon. They have calculated that at the moment a layer of only 1.7 mm reduces the radiation of whatever is below it by 2.4%, it is not much, but they believe they can improve it much more. in fact, when it was on the international space station it grew 1.2 times faster under cosmic radiation.

In 2022, NASA confirmed that it could be used for self-healing habitats, for example, on Mars, for example, you have a dome on Mars, you cover it with this fungus and if there is any breakdown or breakage or anything, then this fungus grows back and recovers the dome, that would be self-healing, currently the latest that is known about this fungus is that they are studying it to use it together with the Martian regolith, the regolith is the stones and dust, in this case of Mars, but regolith is also called lunar regolith in the case of the moon, apart from radiation, the fungus itself needs nutrients to be able to grow and thrive, radiation is its source of energy, but it also needs nutrients and that is why they are investigating to see if it is possible that with the nutrients or materials that are in the soil of Mars this fungus can thrive and at the moment it seems so. That is to say, if you released it on Mars, this mushroom would live wonderfully.

The idea is not only to use it to terraform Mars, which is more on a large scale, but in the area of ​​the base, well, to use it on the outside of the base so that it also serves as a shield for what is underneath, that would be the intention and right now the Ukrainians are also using it to decontaminate the contaminated soils of Chernobyl because by using it it reduces radiation to levels in the environment where it is.

On Mars we cannot have it, on the outside of Mars, obviously, not inside a base, on the outside it is not possible, there cannot be water because there is not enough pressure, on the Martian equator in summer at noon you can reach positive 20 degrees, but the normal thing is that the temperatures are always at -40 or -50 degrees calmly on Mars, any water turns into snow.

The question is if these mushrooms could even be sprinkled with a little snow from time to time, perhaps that would be enough for them, at the moment NASA is studying whether to use the Martian regolith to grow these mushrooms, because they are a shield against radiation and are great in the Martian Caribbean.

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