By Wing-Chi Poon (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. – Isaac Asimov, The Last Question
As a youth, I remember stepping on a puffball in a field near where I grew up in Virginia. Puffballs are a sort of roundish mushroom without a cap or gills. Almost all of them are edible, although without a distinctive taste, when they are young and pure white inside. As the spores mature, the inside of puffballs form a mass in the center of the fruiting body. Eventually the covering of the puffball dries and shrivels and an opening develops in the top. At that point, the slightest provocation will trigger the release of the spores from the opening and cast them to the four winds. According to David Arora (1), a large puffball may contain seven trillion spores. On this day in my youth, I played my part in the propagation of the puffball. At the time, I saw something that looked like brown dust coming from the top of a odd looking sac . It was the puffball finding its own way to spread itself.
