Often vilified by Hollywood as potential competitors and even threats to humans, both sea dwelling and fictional off world octopuses have made many a filmgoer squirm in horror. Aside from their piercing eyes, their brains and morphologies are as different from humans as any species could be.
But because they evolved hundreds of millions of years before Homo sapiens were even a twinkle in Earth’s evolutionary eye, their study is inherently valuable in trying to understand alternate pathways to intelligence. Such research should also help in understanding the sort of sentient aliens that we earthlings may eventually encounter in our search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Yet the octopus has a few things going against it, which is why it’s highly unlikely we will ever encounter octopus-like space aliens. Here are a few reasons why.
Their blood is copper rich.
The great failure of octopuses is in their copper-based blood, Peter Ward, an author and paleontologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, told me via phone. It does not hold as much oxygen as iron-based blood such as ours, Ward told me. They’ve got such giant brains that they are always on the edge of oxygen starvation, he says. And their brains can’t get any bigger because they can’t get enough oxygen to support it, he says.
Why did they vector towards copper instead of iron?
There was iron, but physiologically, they found it advantageous to use copper, says Ward. And it may have had nothing to do with the bioavailability of iron, he says. Instead, it may be entirely based on what proteins were available and how their physiology already worked, notes Ward.
One would never guess that the octopus that we know today began its evolution some 500 million years ago from simple snail-like creatures.
But there’s the rub.
Copper works great for a tiny little snail, because they never exercise much, says Ward. Yet because the octopus evolved from these tiny little snail-like creatures, they’re stuck with brains that are always on the edge of oxygen starvation, he says.
Their lifespans are incredibly short.
The octopus’ average lifespan is no more than three years and their mean longevity is only two years, says Ward. They also have the fastest growth rate of almost any animal we know, he says.
But octopuses have too short an individual lifespan to fully develop intellectually.
Even so, cephalopods —- the taxonomic class to which octopuses belong —- have much larger nervous systems than all other invertebrates, Peter Godfrey-Smith writes in his 2017 book Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life. A common eight-armed octopus (Octopus vulgaris) has about 500 million neurons in its body, close to the range of dogs, Godfrey-Smith writes.
Like two-year-old kids, they don’t have any life experience, says Ward. Take humans at that age, and tell me if they are “intelligent,” he asks. Sure, they are starting to talk, he says, but what two-year-old can build a radio telescope, or rocket ship? Octopuses never live long enough to have enough experience to really use their native intelligence, says Ward, and that’s one of the greatest tragedies in nature.
Octopuses are loners and are never cooperative.
They would need culture, social learning, and the ability to cooperate in order to advance to any sort of civilization, Godfrey-Smith, professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney in Australia, told me via email. They show a different design for a mind, but probably not a basis on which culture and technology would readily arise, he says.
Technology development requires cooperation.
You don’t see any social interaction between them other than fighting, says Ward. But they don’t really seem to do have any sort of social hierarchy, he says.
Cephalopods tend to be cannibals.
These guys are just voracious carnivores, if they come across a very small specimen of their own species, they’ll just eat it right up, says Ward. But their prey is almost entirely crustaceans, he says.
Such creatures rarely make societies, says Ward.
Technological development is well-nigh impossible under water.
Ward wonders how they would be able to smelt metals in order to build machines and computers and astronomical instruments? As he puts it: No fire, no metals, no spaceships. It takes a village to build a starship, says Ward.
And even if intelligent octopus-like aliens do exist on an earthlike water world circling a solar type star, we’d likely have to go there to find out.
We’d meet alien cephalopods by traveling there, rather than them coming to us, says Godfrey-Smith.
