I'm a science journalist and host of Cosmic Controversy (brucedorminey.podbean.com) as well as author of 'Distant Wanderers: the Search for Planets Beyond the Solar System.' I primarily cover aerospace and astronomy.
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.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.
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.
Octopus Vulgaris Peter Godfrey-Smith Octopus Octopus Seti
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