Most cephalopods and, I think, all octopoda are semelparous--they procreate once, and then usually die not longer after. I wonder if this is their Great Filter, preventing the emergence of more cooperative, social behaviors among themselves that could potentially put them on the path humans found themselves on.
Certainly I think octopus and squid, along with covids and some other groups, show that intelligence is rather easy to come by so long as it's adaptive. Human-level intelligence is probably only adaptive given other factors that preceded leaps in our intelligence. For example, I bet nascent (but theretofore unseen) altruism and culture emerged and created an ecological environment into which our intelligence could profitably expand, after which the process probably accelerated and became more dynamic.
In my eyes their solitude and their short and fragile lives are what caused them to evolve to such a fascinating creature. Just like the human's fragility: no inherent armour, no inherent weapon, no inherent speed. If you can survive under those conditions, you'll certainly be interesting.
Wouldn't it make more sense that the fragility, lack of armor (fur/thick skin) or claws etc. Came after tools made them redundant, like how our bowels are shorter than apes' because they atrophied after the invention of cooking- a digestive system capable of processing raw good being less efficient overall in that new environment?
> octopoda are semelparous--they procreate once, and then usually die not longer after. I wonder if this is their Great Filter, preventing the emergence of more cooperative, social behaviors among themselves that could potentially put them on the path humans found themselves on.
The fact that they are solitary is a much, much bigger obstacle than the fact that they die quickly.
It was related to the discussion of octopus being condemned to a loner existence by cannibalism and their "death-spiral" after procreation. A meaningful observing of octopus culture would only be possible if this was fixed.
The ocean is their great filter. Ocean animals are very limited in their tool use - there's not much in the way of rocks or sticks to be had. Some shells and corals. And fire is off the table. I would expect it to be true that any technological civilization has to live on land at least part of the time.
No fire means no energy or metals which means no technology more advanced than the Stone age.
One could conceive of a species that makes its own tools the same way it makes its own shells, and uses energy from hydrothermal vents, but yeah, chemistry and metallurgy would be pretty difficult underwater.
When the name COVID-19 first came out, I found myself frequently fighting back the urge to smile and think about 19 crime-fighting crows and ravens (Force Corvid-19).
And that's a good thing, because if they lived as long as we do and worked out how to get along with each other they'd be running the planet, and most likely farming us for food.
It’s pretty hard to rule the land from the water. Even with all of our technological might, do you think we could wage war on an ocean-bound technologically advanced species? They have the same disadvantage. In all likelihood we would coexist.
I don’t have a good answer to “what does underwater technological progression look like?” I just want to point out that we are under a heavy survivorship bias. Just because we are where we are does not mean there aren’t other plausible histories.
Sure, you can't identify path dependence from 1 data point.
Moving back to the land-sea war, we know how to make bombs and stuff, so they better have something like steel and know how to come attack us on land and so on if there is any notion of it being a contest.
there is some pretty good sci-fi about intelligent octopuses[1], one of the coolest ideas is how a society might evolve in a way that reflects the animal's nervous system, i.e. more of a distributed thing than our centralized one.
(Though one should put in the time to also read the novel of which this is a sequel, which is about intelligent spiders, and is also pretty nice.)
They would need to solve the problem that was easy on land: how do you release an energy from one resource to thermally pricess other resource (food at first but then metals).
There are two things holding back octopodes from world domination: their short lifespan and solitary nature. Both of which should be curable. If instead of curing cancer in mice every week, if we fixed these two issues in octopodes, we will probably have our own aliens in our oceans.
Same. But even more curious is that it's not as if they die of old age or anything typically...the parents both seem to commit suicide of sorts after having offspring. So that leaves the bigger question of why? Does reproduction doom them for death internally? Population control mechanism? Really interesting.
In some species at least, it’s not really suicide, more of an all-in reproductive strategy. In these species, a female will stop eating so that she can spend 100% of her life tending to the egg mass, protecting it from predators as well as using her arms to circulate water around the eggs for proper oxygenation (the mass is stationary, usually adhered to rock or an otherwise sheltered crevice).
Unlike fish eggs, octopus eggs generally take several weeks to hatch once fertilized. Going this long without food basically starves the brood mother to death (or makes it exceedingly unlikely that she will be able to recuperate on her own).
I realize you still could describe this as suicide with extra steps, per your comment.
