It seems to me based on the patterns of nature that the octopus is the coming top predator of the planet. Life on land is too easy for generating speciation in humans and their life span is too long. Dolphins are surely intelligent mammals, but they lack that horrible edge that solves the Type I-II problem in the long times. I was listening to the "bloop" and wondering if they have been testing weapons under the ice caps. I don't think they would see us as a threat because we would not suspect their ultimate dominance. Scouring the ocean and creating havoc just raises the differentiation rate. As much as I deplore the malicious nature of people, it would have to be much more to keep the genetic pressure strong enough for people to be individually more adapted. It is hard to guess what randomness has designed in the sea and certainly it is the toughest game on the planet.
I could imagine that the ability to mimic could eventually lead to the exact neural structure that gave advantage to apes. I know the Simpson's have already explored the dominance of species in the stars and concluded it is the octopus so I won't claim first principle on that.
Travel in a variably pressurized fluid filled containment would be optimum for space. The ability to deform would also be instrumental in tolerating G forces without loss of consciousness. If I were designing a species for space travel it would probably be a creature that was mostly brain and had no vertebra. I suppose they are just waiting for the machines to wipe us out and then fall in disarray from entropy, and finally take their throne. I would think that the ability to be a living flat panel display on command would be a better form of communication than speech and also less ambiguous. They certainly already know what lying is, so they will have some really good politicians.
I saw a few octopi watching the well in the Gulf and shaking their tentacles. The gist of it seemed to be a joke about the number of human engineers to do something, but I could have translated that wrong. In any case, I doubt that they are worried. It wouldn't be hard to hide a genetic wet bench at the bottom of the ocean.
The octopus is the only invertebrate which has been conclusively shown to use tools.
If an octopus were intelligent and did not want to be found, would we be able to find them in the ocean? It is very difficult to find a metal submarine weighing tons, and something that has the ability to mimic rock would certainly be ignored. They live in three space and some have three hearts. They can lay 100s of thousands of eggs, that is bizarre. With a life span of a year, that is a growth rate of up to 10^5 per year or about 1 every 5 minutes starting from 1 and 100,000 every 5 minutes the next year. That would be larger than the world population in about 2 years ( If they had no enemies ). Roughly.
0 comments:
Post a Comment