For decades, psychedelic enthusiasts have joked that magic mushrooms feel like they came from another planet. Now, thanks to a remarkable discovery by NASA, that idea has become just a little less fanciful.
Scientists analysing samples from the asteroid Bennu have confirmed the presence of triptofan — an amino acid that forms the biochemical foundation for some of nature’s most fascinating molecules, including serotonin, DMT and psilocybin.
No, NASA hasn’t discovered magic mushrooms drifting through space.
But it has found one of the essential molecular ingredients needed to make them.
For legendary mycologist Paul Stamets, that’s a discovery with profound implications. In a recent Substack essay, Stamets argues that the chemistry underpinning psychedelics may not be unique to Earth at all. Instead, it could be woven into the very fabric of the universe.
It’s a bold idea… but one that’s grounded in some genuinely fascinating science.
A Cosmic Ingredient for Psychedelics
The story begins with Bennu, a carbon-rich asteroid roughly 500 metres across that formed before Earth itself.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned samples from Bennu in 2023, giving scientists an unprecedented opportunity to examine some of the oldest material in our solar system. In late 2025, researchers confirmed that the samples contained triptofan, one of the twenty amino acids used by life on Earth to build proteins.
That matters because tryptophan also sits at the beginning of a remarkable biochemical pathway. Inside living organisms, tryptophan can be converted into tryptamine through a simple reaction known as decarboxylation, where a carbon dioxide molecule is removed.
From there, evolution takes over.
Tryptamine provides the molecular backbone for compounds including psilocin (the active form of psilocybin), DMT, serotonină și chiar melatonin.
In other words, one of the fundamental building blocks required for psychedelic chemistry appears to exist naturally in space. While that doesn’t de fapt mean psilocybin itself is floating around the galaxy, it does suggest that the chemistry needed to produce these compounds may be far older than life on Earth.
Why Do Mushrooms Keep Inventing Psilocybin?
One of the biggest mysteries surrounding psilocybin is how often it has evolved. Scientists now know that more than 220 species of mushrooms produce psilocybin, spread across every continent except Antarctica.
Even more intriguing, many of these species didn’t inherit the ability from a common ancestor. Instead, evolution appears to have independently “invented” psilocybin multiple separate times.
Biologists call this convergent evolution.
It’s the same reason birds, bats and insects all evolved wings independently. When evolution repeatedly arrives at the same solution, it’s usually because that solution offers some kind of advantage. Researchers still debate exactly what that advantage is.
The leading theory suggests psilocybin may help protect fungi from insects or influence interactions with other organisms living in decaying wood. Whatever its original purpose, the repeated emergence of the same molecule across such distant fungal lineages suggests psilocybin isn’t simply an evolutionary accident.
As Stamets argues, it’s a molecule nature seems remarkably keen to rediscover.
DMT Isn’t Just Found in Plants
Psilocybin isn’t the only psychedelic with an unexpectedly broad family tree. Stamets also points to DMT, one of the simplest naturally occurring tryptamines. DMT has been identified in an astonishing range of life forms.
It’s found in the Amazonian plants used to prepare ayahuasca, in Acacia trees, certain grasses, fungi, marine organisms and, in the form of 5-MeO-DMT, in the secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad.
These organisms diverged hundreds of millions of years ago, yet many independently produce closely related molecules. The conventional explanation is that tryptamine chemistry is ancient, metabolically inexpensive and useful in a variety of biological contexts.
Stamets doesn’t disagree. He simply asks a bigger question.
If the chemical foundations for these compounds existed before Earth formed, perhaps this family of molecules isn’t an oddity of terrestrial evolution at all?
Perhaps it’s part of a much older chemical story.
Are Psychedelics Written Into the Universe?
This is where the conversation shifts from biochemistry into philosophy.
Stamets suggests that if compounds related to psilocybin arise naturally from universal chemistry — and if those compounds reliably promote neuroplasticity, new neural connections and altered states of consciousness on Earth — perhaps consciousness itself isn’t as rare or isolated as we often imagine.
It’s an idea that echoes several longstanding philosophical traditions.
Panpsihismul proposes that consciousness may be a fundamental feature of reality rather than something that suddenly appears once brains become sufficiently complex.
Eastern philosophies such as Vedanta describe consciousness as an underlying quality of existence itself.
The French philosopher and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky humanity contributing to a global field of collective consciousness he called the Noosphere.
None of these ideas have been proven scientifically, but Stamets’ argument introduces an unusual twist. Rather than beginning with mystical experience, he starts with asteroid chemistry.
As he writes:
“Psilocybin and DMT will be found throughout the cosmos, on other planets. This is the way of being.”
Whether or not that prediction turns out to be true, it’s a fascinating way to think about molecules we’ve traditionally regarded as uniquely earthly.
Terence McKenna’s Cosmic Mushroom Theory
For psychedelic readers, Stamets’ ideas may sound strangely familiar. In the 1970s and 80s, ethnobotanist Terence McKenna famously proposed that mushroom spores may have travelled through space on comets or meteorites—a concept sometimes referred to as panspermia.
McKenna speculated that fungi could be among the universe’s greatest explorers, spreading life between worlds over millions of years. It’s an imaginative hypothesis rather than an accepted scientific theory, and there is currently no evidence that psilocybin mushrooms themselves arrived on Earth from space.
However, NASA’s discovery does make one aspect of McKenna’s broader vision feel a little less impossible. The chemistry needed to build psychedelic molecules doesn’t necessarily begin on Earth… at least some of its ingredients appear to be truly cosmic.
Why This Matters
Over the last decade, most psychedelic research has understandably focused on clinical outcomes. Researchers have explored psilocybin’s potential to support people living with depression, addiction, end-of-life anxiety and PTSD, with encouraging results continuing to emerge.
Stamets is inviting us to zoom out. Instead of viewing psilocybin as an unusual molecule produced by an unusual mushroom, perhaps it belongs to a much larger family of chemistry that has been unfolding since before our planet even existed.
A Universe That Keeps Making Tryptamines
Whether consciousness is fundamental to the universe remains an open question, and whether psychedelic compounds exist elsewhere in the cosmos is also unknown.
But one thing is now clear. The raw chemistry that eventually gives rise to serotonin, DMT and psilocybin isn’t confined to Earth.
Some of its building blocks were drifting through space billions of years before the first forests appeared, before fungi colonised land around 475 million years ago, and long before humans wondered why eating certain mushrooms could dissolve the boundaries between self and nature.
Maybe that’s just chemistry doing what chemistry does. Or maybe, as both Paul Stamets and Terence McKenna have suggested in their own very different ways, mushrooms aren’t simply organisms growing from the soil beneath our feet.
Perhaps they’re also tiny reminders that life (and the molecules that shape consciousness) has always been part of a much bigger story.
