Literally The ONLY Things Preventing Octopi From Finishing Their Evolution To A Fully Civilizational

literally the ONLY things preventing octopi from finishing their evolution to a fully civilizational sophont species are their lack of social cooperation and the fact that they have no way to transfer knowledge across generations. once they can figure out language and thereby the capacity to organize, they will be unstoppable.

I can’t wait.

Octopus filmed changing colours while sleeping.

hi! astrobiologist with a longtime special interest in palaeo-science, here with a fun fact: she’s not far off the mark!

there’s a reasonably plausible hypothesis that describes how chunks of Earth ejected during the Chicxulub impact at the end of the Cretaceous would have more than matched escape velocity for the Earth-Moon system and been flung out into the greater solar system, potentially colliding with other bodies like Mars or the Galilean Moons! If these objects were carrying life on them, likely highly durable bacteria or microbial life (*coughs* TARDIGRADES), they could actually have seeded other worlds in the system with terrestrial life!

so in short, the dino-killer space rock may have actually yeeted water bears to Europa! we won’t know for sure til we explore the icy moons of Jupiter, but the possibility is there!

I went to high school with a girl who said we should check the other planets for the dinasours because when the meteor hit they probably got catapulted away :(

and how can you be sure she’s wrong

Helicoprion: What if, like, teeth,

Mesosaurus: Yeah?

Helicoprion: but WHEEL

Mesosaurus: No don’t -

Helicoprion:

(Image by ДиБгд)

I noticed this post is missing a couple smash hits from TES lore so I’m just gonna throw em in here.

let me start by pointing out that the entire premise of TES V: Skyrim is that the player has the ability to change the fabric of reality by yelling.

the human species was liberated from elven dominion pretty much solely by one extremely angry dude who was, and I am not making this up, a gay immortal cyborg demigod from the future.

this is a dubiously canon fact but I should also include that the first empire used giant moths to build a colony on the smaller moon, and then forgot about it.

another dubiously canon fact: the cat people were created by their primary deity to be able to stack on top of each other to reach the moon. yes, literally. which also makes them, collectively, an anchor of reality.

you wanna know how fucked up elder scrolls is? i’ll tell you how fucked up elder scrolls is. heres how fucking fucked up elder scrolls is

What do you mean by "elves are a fungus"? Gnomes as terrestrial cephalopods makes more sense (clever and dexterous), but not seeing your reasoning on the elves.

So a couple days back @mazarinedrake was helpfully infodumping about Pathfinder for me, becuase I’m 2 years into a game and know dick fuck about the Lore, and APPARENTLY the elves in pathfinder??? are literally Aliens???

So that resulted in a late-night insomniac discussion of “If you were gonna design a fantasy RPG where none of the other races are Primates, what would you make them be? and I think we came up with:

Elves are a Fungus, but specifically, Elves are the fruiting bodies of a Vast Underground Superorganism, which is why there’s that bit in LOTR where the elves sometimes find other ‘adult’ elves down by the lake.  They feel a deep connection to thier surrundings, not because of some spiritual thing, but because they’re all small organs of a body that spans continents and thusly reccive cellular signals.  At the end of an Elf’s natural lifespan, they burst into a cloud of glittering spores.  

Dwarves are chemotrophic plants, like the algae that live at the bottom of the ocean at the thermal vents or alkaline lakes.  They never see the sunlight, but don’t need to becuase their metabolic process is based on exothermic chemical reactions that power thier cells.  they mine not as a traditional industry, but as a means of agriculture- they literally crave that mineral.

Gnomes are terrestrial cephlapods that started as something much like a Mimic octopus that took it Way Too Far (out of the ocean).  they’re dextrous, clever, obsessed with color, and have a society whose values are pretty much unfathomable to a bunch of pretentious monkeys.

Halflings are tiny, really ugly Birds. Maybe they originally started like crows, with thier fondness for good foods and shiny objects, but over time, they developed a coukoo-like habit of leaving thier newly-hatched babies in human homes becuase if you can fool a human family? that’s an amazing start in life for a chick.  Over time, they began to look more and more like humans as a means of camoflacge, then retained more and more neotenic features to keep humans feeding them for longer.

Humanity’s closest relative is Orcs, because they’re also mammals!  they’re terrestrial whales! Orcish tusks are simmilar to the tusks of beaked whales, and the roving bands of orcs are very similar to dolphin Pods.

the fact that we know so little about the ice giants and the outer solar system in general is pissing me off something awful today.

the only times anything made by humans was even close to Uranus or Neptune were the Voyager probes, and those were flybys that lasted a few days, tops. we know next to nothing about either planet’s moons, and in fact Voyager 2 discovered about 6 new Neptunian moons on its APPROACH. we have no complete maps of any ice giant moons; the best we’ve got are some blurry hemispheres from the larger ones, and the rest are tiny dots jpg’d to hell from being superzoomed. we only found out what Pluto actually looks like five years ago, and we have no fucking CLUE what Eris (or any other Kuiper Belt dwarf planet) looks like. but this is all exciting and enticing!

the part that’s making me angry is that we COULD know more, but politicians and their poisonous, twisted priorities are in the way. we have technology now that was only discussed in the pages of science fiction in the 60s and 70s! we have ion drives and miniaturized nuclear reactors and ultra-high-definition cameras and remarkably advanced AI! we can do amazing things remotely, even with the light delay, and it’s not even that fucking expensive!! I mean, LOOK AT THIS.

this is the proposed flight path of the Uranus Pathfinder mission concept. wouldn’t this be a fucking awesome mission? for only half a billion dollars you get passing data from Venus and Saturn and a fresh, in-depth look at Uranus! sure it takes 16 years but whatever, that’s how spaceflight works!

the quote of “born too late to explore the world, born too early to explore the universe” is BULLSHIT. this is the opening of a golden age of solar system exploration; or it could be, if we let it!! defund the military, start fixing the ecosphere, help the working class, and then LET’S EXPLORE THE GODDAMN UNIVERSE ALREADY!!!