Sapience - Tumblr Posts
In the speculative evolution community, there are three generally accepted top picks for the prospective evolution of nonhuman sapience: dolphins, crows/ravens, and –you guessed it– cephalopods. These little dudes are fucking incredible, and the ONLY thing holding them back from racing to civilizational sapience is their lifespans. Typically they have little to no generational overlap, preventing learned behaviors from being passed down and advanced. Fix that up and sprinkle in a little bit of communalism (which the gloomy octopus already has significant traces of) and they’d be well on their way to a technological civilization comparable to that of humans.
(fun fact: my world Sphaera has all three of these nonhuman people and more! merfolk are dolphins, gryndulos are octopi, and kenku are ravens!)
Just because we’re the first technologically advanced species on this planet doesn’t mean we’ll be the last.
literally cannot stop thinking about that article talking about how crows are starting to use tools and pass down that knowledge and someone said they were entering the stone age. the stone age. bro. imagine when we entered the stone age there was just some other species already having built their shit looking at us going like “oh fuck humans are using sticks for stuff and teaching their kids how to do that haha cool”. this is the premise of a sci-fi novel. i can’t even think about it without feeling like personally responsible for the development of crows on a species level over the next several thousand years
THIIIIIISSSSS THIS THIS THIS. The centralized hive fallacy is seen prominently in Ender’s Game, where the queen is the unifying force. I don’t think most writers quite understand how much cooler it is to work with an emergent-sapient swarm or colony, especially if the component organisms are specialized. what it comes down to is that fundamentally, sapience isn’t limited to humanlike psychology or sociology. the intelligence that octopi, dolphins, corvids, etc display are all different, both from each other and from human intelligence, as products of their own specialized evolutionary lineages and niches.
The idea that hive minds in sci-fi have queens or some other central apparatus like a mother ship makes no sense at all. That completely defeats the purpose of a hive mind, which is decentralization.
It speaks to kind of society we live in where it’s generally assumed that unity is achieved through domination only.
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.
astute of you to pick up of the hurdle that firestarting presents! but I promise you, fire is not a universal keystone for tool-using sapience. let’s look at it this way: what did early hominids use fire for?
cooking food - octopi don’t necessarily need to do that. if they really felt like it, they could strategically sun-dry and store fish onshore (octopi can survive out of water for significant periods of time!)
providing light and warmth - octopi have much better low-light vision than we do, so again, they don’t need fire for that.
fending off predators - octopi have the most advanced biological camouflage in the world and lack bones. they can hide extremely effectively, and if worst comes to worst they have ink to provide cover during an escape.
metallurgy - this one is more of an issue, as fire is necessary to produce the vast temperatures that smelting and forging common metals (iron, nickel, copper, etc) require. however, there’s more than one way around this! of course they could just come onto land to do their metallurgy, but there are a few metals/metalloids that are malleable at relatively low temperatures (i.e. underwater); notably, aluminum, zinc, and lead. but who says metals are the only way to make advanced tools...?
two words for you: artificial selection. due to the fact that metallurgy (and, later on, electricity) is a technology that isn’t feasible underwater, it would make much more sense to selectively breed other organisms to be living tools. they might start by carefully cultivating a few generations of clams to produce hatchet-shaped shells, but given time, resources, and the right base stock, the possibilities are virtually endless, especially once they unlock the secrets of direct genetic engineering. as far as we can tell, the psychology of octopi is extremely alien to that of humans, and from what I’ve read they show a remarkable amount of patience, which is needed to achieve significant progress in this toolmaking method. can you imagine it? vast biopunk metropoli sprawling across the ocean floor...!
Octopus filmed changing colours while sleeping.
Corvids are one of about five extant groups of animals that clearly demonstrate the emergence of proper sapience (the others being apes, elephants, cetaceans, and cephalopods). They use tools and language, form complex social structures, have self-awareness, and can reason abstractly. In another few thousand years, given the right evolutionary encouragement, it's completely conceivable that they will develop a civilization as we would recognize it. Personally I'm of the opinion that we should be their cool older sibling civilization and help them out, because it's elating to consider that one day we may not have to be alone in the universe anymore.
You ever think about how crows are acting not unlike how early humans probably did and you're just like. Oh ok
You ever think about how crows are acting not unlike how early humans probably did and you're just like. Oh ok
A bird explaining to a hedgehog crossing so it doesn’t die.
I love how both corvids and parrots are in general highly intelligent, but where corvids generally have strict hierarchies, solve disagreements in the pecking order by fighting, and have a strong dislike for anything new or foreign until they figure out how to make use of it, parrots are just here to party.
The New Caledonian crow, who knows how to specifically build a tool in order to build another tool, never engages in play. These motherfuckers are smarter than some people with the right to vote, and they are Extremely Serious Birds. They don't have time to play, they got work to do and kids to raise.
And then there's the kea, straight-up titled "clown of the mountains", that has a specific vocalization for "playtime!". Scientists decided to try what happens if they play the Play Call for two fully-grown adult keas that are together in an area and can clearly see there is no other, third kea to make the call, and they just go "great idea, disembodied voice! it's TIME TO FUCKING PARTY!" and start wrestling.
Imagine working really hard in order to make it into a top university to study astrophysics, making it to your first Very Serious Class, sitting down full of serious determination, and the dude next to you is taking notes without using his hands, with a glitter pen he's shoved up his nose. And his notes are good.
i think the thing that bugs me most about the "earth is a deathworld" genre as a whole, from a narrative structure sense, is that they almost always combine it with human exceptionalism. like humans are the dominant species on earth yes but that's because being a tool user is like going at evolution with console commands enabled.
even if all the aliens are super physically frail for whatever contrived reason, that's basically irrelevant to "your materials science must be this good to build spacecraft", and materials science trumps physicality for tool users.
aliens encountering earth for the first time wouldn't be like "whoa a planet of ubermenschen to save us from insert-evil-imperialist-species-here i'm glad someone found a way to make the noble savage narrative about white people" it would be "why are so many of their signals celebrating the eradication of another species shouldn't that be a traged-holy fuck I'm glad this variola thing is dead. what do you mean they sequenced its entire genome"