If the UFOs don’t get you, the calamari will.
An octopus is an intelligent animal as tests have shown. Able to move outside water for a half hour, this cephalopod (head\-on-foot) organism has been known to move out of an aquarium in a lab to rob a neighboring aquarium of a prey. That’s a pretty good task for a sea creature. That kind of intelligence seems to be the motive for Professor Tim Coulson of Oxford to say octopuses a primed to create an underwater civilization. * Just give them time to evolve without putting them on the menu of a Mediterranean restaurant.
And that’s the problem. Interfering humans have been around for some time now, and octopus has been on their menu for at least a couple of thousand years. I’m guessing Caesar ate one. Coulson’s musing about an octopus civilization lies in the context of potential (some say “inevitable”) human extinction. Will either the fall of humans or the rise of octopuses happen?
In the language of crime shows, we seem inclined to off ourselves,. We commit suicide, elf-elimination (or offing), and murder. Then there’s war. Nothing beats a good war to thin the species. WWII eliminated over 50 million. WWIII will eliminate more. But probably in some corner of the planet there’ll be some survivors capable of reproducing, so, just as we did after the gigantic semi-extinction event of 74,000 years ago when Toba erupted, we’ll likely survive as the planet’s dominant organisms—not in number, but in control.**
But What if the Octopuses Are Aliens Arising from the Depths of Our Seas?
Are alien species in the form of octopuses already here? Seems like a silly question, but some are asking it in the halls of government.
So, in Congress and in the news there’s talk of anomalous objects rising from the seas or going into them. Not breaching whales or flying fish, mind you, not Great Whites rocketing upward to catch a seal, but UFOs, or, as they are now called UAPs. They haven’t been identified, thus the “U.” Puzzling objects observed by experienced pilots and land-bound witnesses, these objects exhibit apparent technologies that enable physics-defying movements in the manner only seen in science fiction films. Are Coulson’s octopuses poised to rebel against Mediterranean restaurateurs?
Are there critters living under the oceans that have such technologies? ARE THEY OCTOPUSES?
A number of science fiction novels and films depict aliens as octopuses: It Came from Beneath the Sea, among the earliest such films, Arrival among the most recent. But octopuses have a long way to go to reach human-like civilization, regardless of their bodies having a widely distributed neuronal system that makes every tentacle a kind of individual brain. And no, you don’t have that; otherwise you could find meaning in the expression “I have more brain in my little finger than you have in your head.”
That Congress Has Taken the Question of Aliens Seriously Suggests
Don’t make hasty conclusions . Just because the US Congress has taken up an inquiry into aliens, UFOs, UAPs, and otherworld beings living in our oceans doesn’t mean there’s anything to the inquiry. Just remember Russia Collusion from a few years ago. Congress, it seems, will ask about anything given enough public interest. And with regard to public interest, one can say it exists. After more than a century of popular science fiction running from the works of Jules Verne through those of H. G. Wells, Spielberg, Roddenberry, and Lucas, just about everyone has been exposed to strange but highly functioning creatures in books, movies, and TV shows about aliens.
But no one can as yet say, I’ve had an encounter of the third kind, and here on my fireplace mantel is where I keep the evidence. You can look, but don’t touch. Someone told me it’s worth a fortune.”
Aren’t there video records? Sure, but of what? If they were identifiable, they wouldn’t be called “unidentified.” They could be artifacts of the recording devices. Yet, those who have seen the objects swear what they saw was “real.” And Congress, after the Russian Collusion fiasco proves itself to be willing listeners.
The Bigger Story Is Potential Human Extinction
“Scientists reveal which creature will RULE Earth should all humans die” is the headline in the Daily Mail that caught my attention and inspired this little essay. Of course, the Daily Mail isn’t the equivalent of a scientific journal like Nature, but then hypothesizing that humans will go extinct isn’t, in an age when a Russian dictator threatens to use nuclear weapons, a matter just for esoteric scientific inquiry. Everyone has some skin in the game. (Although I haven’t polled the fictional 97% that Al Gore repeatedly cites, I believe that among an actual 97% of scientists only a very few are dumb enough to want to run the experiment that Putin seems to be running)
Kicking the Biggest Bucket
In his discussion of “living fossils” in which he points to organisms that have seemingly survived both local and mass extinctions, David M. Raup notes that even horseshoe crabs, which appear to have survived for hundreds and millions of years are probably different from their very ancient counterparts. And sharks, those primitive cartilaginous fish that trace their genetic heritage to the Paleozoic, have branched into over two hundred different species. As Raup then concludes, “Most species we cite as living fossils, like the coelacanth, are probably on the slow end of [an evolutionary rate of change] … More important, there is no evidence that organisms have ever evolved an immunity to extinction” (42). *** Nevertheless, I’m putting my money for survival on cockroaches and ubiquitous bacteria.
Scares Increase Readership, More So in Scary Times
People in the media are good at frightening other people. Sensational news telling thrives because reporters are so good at bringing up such scare topics as extinction on slow news days. But one has to say that the octopus takeover story sits in the middle of stories of a war Russia started and then tricked a foolish dictator like North Korea’s into throwing thousands of his people into the death machine. And now three years late, the Biden Administration, instead of heavily arming Ukraine before Putin decided to invade, is okaying Ukraine’s use of long range missiles to hit targets inside Russia. Can anyone say “escalation”? Well, if Putin invited the North Koreans into the fight, aren’t we already at the outset of a world war? Maybe because of the war in Ukraine and a potential all out war between Israel and Iran, the Daily Mail’s article is timely reporting more than it is sensational speculation.
Life’s been around for maybe 3.8 billion years. Before that time Earth was a very hostile and lifeless planet with a largely volcanic and asteroid-impacted, hot waterless surface. But the planet underwent a change as it cooled and bolide impacts decreased in number. Life flourished and then suffered through those mass extinctions. In that long history of planetary and evolutionary change, no species either had the wherewithal or the desire to quash itself out of existence until humans—and maybe our hominin cousins—came along. There aren’t any members of ancient bipedal ancestors on the planet today. Did they drive themselves to extinction, or was their demise just a matter of happenstance?
Waiting for the Calamari Empire
Raup suggests that as many as 40 million species now inhabit Earth’s many environments. How many is hard to say. Bacteria have been found in rocks deep underground, and no one has traversed the water and sediments of the deep trenches to catalogue all the organisms that have adapted to life in that cold, dark, high pressure environment. He also estimates that since its rise, life has produced as many as 50 billion species, 99.9% of which have gone extinct. Hate to tell you that though you might not be next, your time is coming; everyone’s is.
Raup asks a question everyone concerned about the human race might ask: Is proneness to extinction an inherent property of a species—a weakness—or does it depend on vagaries of chance in a risk-ridden world? Engaging in a discussion with Putin on the answer to that question wouldn’t get a rational person anywhere, however. He’s already sent possibly as many as 500,000 of his own people into extinction. As long as he’s not extinct—that day will eventually come, of course, as it will for me—he sees only his ambitious drive to conquer Kiev. Those whom he sent into extinction are no more meaningful than those 50 billion extinct species. Who mourns the ceratopsians? Who mourns the trilobites? Who mourns the Russian dead in the Rus’-Byzantine War of 907, fought by the Kievan Rus? Or, who mourns the dead in the eponymous Vladimir the Great’s campaign against Volga Bulgaria in 985, the dead in the Swedish-Novgorodian Wars from 1132 to 1245, and the dead from all the wars since the formation of the Principality of Moscow in 1263 through the Tsardom of Russia in 1547 to the Russian Republic in 1917 through the Soviet Union to the current Russian Federation? Millions of dead Russians and now counting some 30,00 lost per month fighting fellow slavs in Ukraine, which was, as far back as the 830s, the very center of Russian slavic civilization? Who mourns? Probably not Vlad Putin.
*https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14085209/Scientists-reveal-creature-rule-Earth.html
**The hypothesized effect of the super volcanic eruption is questionable, but the volcano did throw Northern Hemisphere climates into a tizzy. Certainly, the population moving out of Africa at the time would have suffered greatly as enormous amounts of ash fell to blanket 15,000,000 square miles stretching from Europe to Asia. The event has been termed a “bottleneck” or sieve because it filtered out or limited the number of genes that made it from pre- to -post-eruption time. Post-extinction organisms evolve from survivors. Your genetic heritage that stretches back to the origins of life, the evolution of animals, and the survivors of five mass extinctions is what underlies your anatomy and physiology.
***David Raup. Extinction: Bad Luck or Bad Genes? New York. W.W. Norton & Company. 1991.
An octopus is an intelligent animal as tests have shown. Able to move outside water for a half hour, this cephalopod (head\-on-foot) organism has been known to move out of an aquarium in a lab to rob a neighboring aquarium of a prey. That’s a pretty good task for a sea creature. That kind of intelligence seems to be the motive for Professor Tim Coulson of Oxford to say octopuses a primed to create an underwater civilization. * Just give them time to evolve without putting them on the menu of a Mediterranean restaurant.
And that’s the problem. Interfering humans have been around for some time now, and octopus has been on their menu for at least a couple of thousand years. I’m guessing Caesar ate one. Coulson’s musing about an octopus civilization lies in the context of potential (some say “inevitable”) human extinction. Will either the fall of humans or the rise of octopuses happen?
In the language of crime shows, we seem inclined to off ourselves,. We commit suicide, elf-elimination (or offing), and murder. Then there’s war. Nothing beats a good war to thin the species. WWII eliminated over 50 million. WWIII will eliminate more. But probably in some corner of the planet there’ll be some survivors capable of reproducing, so, just as we did after the gigantic semi-extinction event of 74,000 years ago when Toba erupted, we’ll likely survive as the planet’s dominant organisms—not in number, but in control.**
But What if the Octopuses Are Aliens Arising from the Depths of Our Seas?
Are alien species in the form of octopuses already here? Seems like a silly question, but some are asking it in the halls of government.
So, in Congress and in the news there’s talk of anomalous objects rising from the seas or going into them. Not breaching whales or flying fish, mind you, not Great Whites rocketing upward to catch a seal, but UFOs, or, as they are now called UAPs. They haven’t been identified, thus the “U.” Puzzling objects observed by experienced pilots and land-bound witnesses, these objects exhibit apparent technologies that enable physics-defying movements in the manner only seen in science fiction films. Are Coulson’s octopuses poised to rebel against Mediterranean restaurateurs?
Are there critters living under the oceans that have such technologies? ARE THEY OCTOPUSES?
A number of science fiction novels and films depict aliens as octopuses: It Came from Beneath the Sea, among the earliest such films, Arrival among the most recent. But octopuses have a long way to go to reach human-like civilization, regardless of their bodies having a widely distributed neuronal system that makes every tentacle a kind of individual brain. And no, you don’t have that; otherwise you could find meaning in the expression “I have more brain in my little finger than you have in your head.”
That Congress Has Taken the Question of Aliens Seriously Suggests
Don’t make hasty conclusions . Just because the US Congress has taken up an inquiry into aliens, UFOs, UAPs, and otherworld beings living in our oceans doesn’t mean there’s anything to the inquiry. Just remember Russia Collusion from a few years ago. Congress, it seems, will ask about anything given enough public interest. And with regard to public interest, one can say it exists. After more than a century of popular science fiction running from the works of Jules Verne through those of H. G. Wells, Spielberg, Roddenberry, and Lucas, just about everyone has been exposed to strange but highly functioning creatures in books, movies, and TV shows about aliens.
But no one can as yet say, I’ve had an encounter of the third kind, and here on my fireplace mantel is where I keep the evidence. You can look, but don’t touch. Someone told me it’s worth a fortune.”
Aren’t there video records? Sure, but of what? If they were identifiable, they wouldn’t be called “unidentified.” They could be artifacts of the recording devices. Yet, those who have seen the objects swear what they saw was “real.” And Congress, after the Russian Collusion fiasco proves itself to be willing listeners.
The Bigger Story Is Potential Human Extinction
“Scientists reveal which creature will RULE Earth should all humans die” is the headline in the Daily Mail that caught my attention and inspired this little essay. Of course, the Daily Mail isn’t the equivalent of a scientific journal like Nature, but then hypothesizing that humans will go extinct isn’t, in an age when a Russian dictator threatens to use nuclear weapons, a matter just for esoteric scientific inquiry. Everyone has some skin in the game. (Although I haven’t polled the fictional 97% that Al Gore repeatedly cites, I believe that among an actual 97% of scientists only a very few are dumb enough to want to run the experiment that Putin seems to be running)
Kicking the Biggest Bucket
In his discussion of “living fossils” in which he points to organisms that have seemingly survived both local and mass extinctions, David M. Raup notes that even horseshoe crabs, which appear to have survived for hundreds and millions of years are probably different from their very ancient counterparts. And sharks, those primitive cartilaginous fish that trace their genetic heritage to the Paleozoic, have branched into over two hundred different species. As Raup then concludes, “Most species we cite as living fossils, like the coelacanth, are probably on the slow end of [an evolutionary rate of change] … More important, there is no evidence that organisms have ever evolved an immunity to extinction” (42). *** Nevertheless, I’m putting my money for survival on cockroaches and ubiquitous bacteria.
Scares Increase Readership, More So in Scary Times
People in the media are good at frightening other people. Sensational news telling thrives because reporters are so good at bringing up such scare topics as extinction on slow news days. But one has to say that the octopus takeover story sits in the middle of stories of a war Russia started and then tricked a foolish dictator like North Korea’s into throwing thousands of his people into the death machine. And now three years late, the Biden Administration, instead of heavily arming Ukraine before Putin decided to invade, is okaying Ukraine’s use of long range missiles to hit targets inside Russia. Can anyone say “escalation”? Well, if Putin invited the North Koreans into the fight, aren’t we already at the outset of a world war? Maybe because of the war in Ukraine and a potential all out war between Israel and Iran, the Daily Mail’s article is timely reporting more than it is sensational speculation.
Life’s been around for maybe 3.8 billion years. Before that time Earth was a very hostile and lifeless planet with a largely volcanic and asteroid-impacted, hot waterless surface. But the planet underwent a change as it cooled and bolide impacts decreased in number. Life flourished and then suffered through those mass extinctions. In that long history of planetary and evolutionary change, no species either had the wherewithal or the desire to quash itself out of existence until humans—and maybe our hominin cousins—came along. There aren’t any members of ancient bipedal ancestors on the planet today. Did they drive themselves to extinction, or was their demise just a matter of happenstance?
Waiting for the Calamari Empire
Raup suggests that as many as 40 million species now inhabit Earth’s many environments. How many is hard to say. Bacteria have been found in rocks deep underground, and no one has traversed the water and sediments of the deep trenches to catalogue all the organisms that have adapted to life in that cold, dark, high pressure environment. He also estimates that since its rise, life has produced as many as 50 billion species, 99.9% of which have gone extinct. Hate to tell you that though you might not be next, your time is coming; everyone’s is.
Raup asks a question everyone concerned about the human race might ask: Is proneness to extinction an inherent property of a species—a weakness—or does it depend on vagaries of chance in a risk-ridden world? Engaging in a discussion with Putin on the answer to that question wouldn’t get a rational person anywhere, however. He’s already sent possibly as many as 500,000 of his own people into extinction. As long as he’s not extinct—that day will eventually come, of course, as it will for me—he sees only his ambitious drive to conquer Kiev. Those whom he sent into extinction are no more meaningful than those 50 billion extinct species. Who mourns the ceratopsians? Who mourns the trilobites? Who mourns the Russian dead in the Rus’-Byzantine War of 907, fought by the Kievan Rus? Or, who mourns the dead in the eponymous Vladimir the Great’s campaign against Volga Bulgaria in 985, the dead in the Swedish-Novgorodian Wars from 1132 to 1245, and the dead from all the wars since the formation of the Principality of Moscow in 1263 through the Tsardom of Russia in 1547 to the Russian Republic in 1917 through the Soviet Union to the current Russian Federation? Millions of dead Russians and now counting some 30,00 lost per month fighting fellow slavs in Ukraine, which was, as far back as the 830s, the very center of Russian slavic civilization? Who mourns? Probably not Vlad Putin.
*https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14085209/Scientists-reveal-creature-rule-Earth.html
**The hypothesized effect of the super volcanic eruption is questionable, but the volcano did throw Northern Hemisphere climates into a tizzy. Certainly, the population moving out of Africa at the time would have suffered greatly as enormous amounts of ash fell to blanket 15,000,000 square miles stretching from Europe to Asia. The event has been termed a “bottleneck” or sieve because it filtered out or limited the number of genes that made it from pre- to -post-eruption time. Post-extinction organisms evolve from survivors. Your genetic heritage that stretches back to the origins of life, the evolution of animals, and the survivors of five mass extinctions is what underlies your anatomy and physiology.
***David Raup. Extinction: Bad Luck or Bad Genes? New York. W.W. Norton & Company. 1991.
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