21 thoughts on “Octopodes”

    1. Not to be confused by that silent German SF film from the 1920s that featured four beautiful women:

      Acht Beine aus dem Weltraum!

  1. An octopus can quickly and easily learn to open a jar, with no prior training or experience. The only way they could do that is if their natural evolution had put a strong survival emphasis on donning and doffing space suit helmets, or removing an astronaut’s helmet and eating his face.

    Their sucker feet would obviously let them stick to and move along any surface in zero G, except when they’re wearing a space suit outside, but a suction cup doesn’t work in a vacuum anyway.

    Since sound can’t travel in a vacuum, the best way to communicate between their space suits is obviously visual, and thus they have their system of sophisticated chromatophores.

    Anyway, I’m thinking of going over old back issues of Analog or Amazing Science Fiction and submitting them to scientific journals, just to see what can get published.

  2. So, if they rained down on Earth from space, we should be finding remains of some sort of the ones that landed on the moon and Mars. Right? And why aren’t they raining down now? And don’t even get me started on the impossible odds that they independently incorporate mitochondria and share the same chirality of the amino acids that is common to all other life forms on Earth.

    But, you know, after reading what George had to say, it’s clear they came from space.

    1. I suspect that you will not find any evidence because they sent the remains of their fleet into the Sun so that they could start fresh. I’m sure they also released their robotic progeny to go their own way through the galaxy.

    2. Life on Mars has the opposite chirality, accordingto the Labelled Release Experiment on Viking. That led to the development of Aspartame.

  3. Octopi are from space. We live in a simulation. It doesn’t matter what you do, you can’t improve your intelligence.

    I’m glad being sciency prevents people from believing crazy things.

      1. A major observance in now enshrined in Scientism and we are coming up on its first anniversary. March 15th, the first day of the original 15 days of Flatten The Curve.

  4. This is not a new theory (specifically cephalopods, not just panspermia), but I don’t remember where I saw it earlier. Is it just me, or are we seeing a lot of this sort of thing lately? I have read that much earlier research is now “inaccessible,” and now I’m seeing old ideas presented as new. I vaguely remember when plate tectonics first rounded the corner from crackpot recycled Wegner to acceptible in the 1960s, I saw a paper suggesting the sun-earth-moon barycenter movement as an energy source (my dad being a geologist, I saw more papers than most kids), now it’s being presented as a “wild new idea.” Makes me wonder.

  5. I have long maintained that whatever alien life forms we may discover in outer space, there will be nothing that will top the alien life forms we have right here on Earth; the lobster and octopus were my examples. It doesn’t get much weirder than that, except for maybe some jellyfish.

  6. As a working hypothesis, how about we posit that a space transport was hauling sea-food from a water planet to a desert planet, suffered a navigation error, and crashed on Earth.

    *Builds a model and runs 10 million computer simulations*

    I’m showing a 70% chance the ship crashed into the ocean, all but confirming that cephalopods came from space.

    1. The Nobel Prize Committee has adopted computer modelling for projecting the value of a nominee’s work in the future. This way, more scientists can be awarded the prize earlier in the careers, thus enabling laureates to have more influence on research in their fields.

      Currently the models are showing George Turner at a 30% chance of winning the next prize in Biology.

  7. It just occurred to me, the alien species represented by Alan Tudyk’s character on “Resident Alien” is evolved from the octopus, or a close facsimile thereof.

    In one episode a previous visitor from his species camouflaged himself as an octopus and wound up living in an aquarium at a local restaurant. He was voiced by Nathan Fillion.

  8. Should be pretty easy to tell with a DNA comparison, unless we’re assuming all life came from space and a common ancestor.

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