this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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I would believe it, those fuckers are smart and if they were social creatures I think they would be in competition with humans for the dominant species . This is an opinion of a person not super well versed on octopi so take this with a good size grain of salt.
Their lifespan is an issue. They live around 2 to 3 years before dying.
Also, the act of reproducing kills the mother. Basically starved to death protecting the eggs. No generational knowledge transfer.
Also doesn’t help that they live underwater. Makes it kinda hard to harness the power of fire or electricity. Especially the former was very important for human domination
And the dad doesn't care. Pfeh, typical. /lh
They usually feed the mom, IIRC.
there are social octopuses, like the larger pacific striped octopus. imo octopuses had 150 million years to rule the planet and they just weren't good enough. skill issue. us humans only had 2-4 million years. i'd say we're doing quite well comparatively.
Maybe their version of "rule the planet" involved mostly just hanging out in their den and thinking interesting thoughts.
Yep they just hang out and do wtf they want to do. They're not going to work and having politics about whose turn it is to make coffee, or why Will should never have got promoted over Kay. Really they're the smarter species
Douglas Adams, The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy
That’s their problem. No work ethic.
They ruled the planet for 150 million years and didn’t ruin the environment once ? What are they even doing?
We’re clearly superior, who else could speed run the mass extinction end game?
That's what Cthulhu wants you to think.
They survived the K-T extiction event or K-Pg event which killed perhaps 75% of species in earth 66 million years ago.
While we are already causing an extinction event which will probably turn out far worse, by causing temperatures to rise to a level higher than in hundreds of millions of years - far outside the range modern life has adapted to. And I am not so sure that we ourselves can survive that in the long run. Humans are incredibly adaptable, that's right. But our food sources are not, not even things like grasses, wheat, or trees, let alone mammals, the great mayority of them (except perhaps algae and mushrooms) are far younger in an evolutionary sense, so it is unlikely they can adapt.
temperatures have been higher, what hasn't happened yet is temperatures changing at such speeds
I don't think domination is actually intelligent or smart.
Octopi if the base word was Latin. It’s Greek, so octopodes for plural. Technically.
Because English is a bastard if a language octopuses and octopi are fine too.
I nominate "octopodusai" to be the new English plural. (Where'd the "a" come from? To make it easier to confuse 'ai' with æ because fuck you, that's why, of course!)
If it was Latin, the singular would be octoped(e) and the plural would be octopedes
Octopodes?
Ahk-top-o-deez nutz.
English can always make things worse.
Fire is a major limitation.