[pesmhey]

What would that look like? So like, some chimps see a monolith and then start using bones as blunt weapons - fast forward some millions of years and we’ve got machine guns. What is the octopus breathing apparatus version of that? Maybe that they carry shells with water in them to extend their time on the surface ever so slightly? They’d design rigid exoskeletons somehow, yeah? Out of shells, barnacles, something like that? Rigid exoskeletons with little shell-cups of water for short periods on the surface.

After that, they’re pretty much on track, no?

[PhasmaFelis]

(Taking things too seriously)

I think the major obstacle facing octopi is that they're solitary. When an ape invents something, a dozen others in its troop learn it too, and maybe refine it a little, and teach it to their children who refine it some more. A tech-savvy modern human isn't much smarter than the earliest homo sapiens, but we have 200,000 years of R&D behind us. Octopi don't have those social bonds, and no one individual--however brilliant--can invent advanced tech alone, from first principles.

[duskwuff]

The other major obstacle is their reproductive cycle. Octopodes breed once, then die shortly afterwards. They don't live to pass knowledge on to their children, and there's no reproductive "reward" for individuals that are more successful in life -- so long as they survive to breed, that's it.

[PhasmaFelis]

Yeah, that's part of the same thing, for sure. They don't share knowledge with other adults or with their own children, so nothing gets passed on.

[fit2rule]

They recently found an 'octopus city' .. wherein there seem to be social patterns emerging.

What's interesting to me is, what if Octopus suddenly evolve in the next 100 or so years, because of some input we humans gave them? That'd be neat.