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Comment by Inconel | Hacker News Reader

I've always imagined if they lived a few decades they would have long ago invented a breathing apparatus that would allow them to survive on land and eliminated humans from competing with them at the top of the food chain.

Bad news for us, on the other hand, Mars would probably be colonized by now.

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What would that look like? So like, some chimps see a monolith and then start using bones as blunt weapons - fast forward some millions of years and we’ve got machine guns. What is the octopus breathing apparatus version of that? Maybe that they carry shells with water in them to extend their time on the surface ever so slightly? They’d design rigid exoskeletons somehow, yeah? Out of shells, barnacles, something like that? Rigid exoskeletons with little shell-cups of water for short periods on the surface.

After that, they’re pretty much on track, no?

(Taking things too seriously)

I think the major obstacle facing octopi is that they're solitary. When an ape invents something, a dozen others in its troop learn it too, and maybe refine it a little, and teach it to their children who refine it some more. A tech-savvy modern human isn't much smarter than the earliest homo sapiens, but we have 200,000 years of R&D behind us. Octopi don't have those social bonds, and no one individual--however brilliant--can invent advanced tech alone, from first principles.

The other major obstacle is their reproductive cycle. Octopodes breed once, then die shortly afterwards. They don't live to pass knowledge on to their children, and there's no reproductive "reward" for individuals that are more successful in life -- so long as they survive to breed, that's it.

Yeah, that's part of the same thing, for sure. They don't share knowledge with other adults or with their own children, so nothing gets passed on.

They recently found an 'octopus city' .. wherein there seem to be social patterns emerging.

What's interesting to me is, what if Octopus suddenly evolve in the next 100 or so years, because of some input we humans gave them? That'd be neat.

Wouldn't they just dominate the seas? Being in the water would give them more real estate and would let them work with higher volumes, therefore growing/evolving faster. And since we are going there as result of 'out-teching' land people they would flood everything (by melting ice) and colonize land space.

I would say that they have their own mindset and culture distinct from ours. Who's to say that they would want to invent air breathing devices to explore the land, eliminate humans, or explore space if they were smarter or more organized?

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