[Buttons840]

Land animals are more likely to develop hands. Hands wouldn't give a fish any advantage, because there is nothing to climb.

Building a rocket requires hands, and the type of intelligence that evolves only after having hands.

[jemmyw]

I don't think this is a great argument. Crabs and lobsters have claws which are almost hand like. And Octopus have tentacles, which can be highly manipulative. So those limbs must give those creatures an advantage even in water. It wouldn't be too much of a leap from those appendages to something as good as hands.

[Buttons840]

I agree. I made my argument, but think it's flawed now. Appreciate the responses.

[Terr_]

> Hands wouldn't give a fish any advantage, because there is nothing to climb.

The ocean floor has plenty of stuff to dig into, pick up, and manipulate, along with un-anchored things like mats of seaweed.

> Land animals are more likely to develop hands.

I can easily imagine sea-creatures making the same kinds of assumptions in reverse: "Sir Blub-blub, while this hypothesis of 'land' animals is indeed intriguing, they would undoubtedly be primitive, far less likely to develop intelligent grabbers. After all, there will be nothing worth grabbing but hard 'dry' rocks! They wouldn't even be useful for propulsion, given the intangibility of this 'air'."

[Teever]

This all pre-supposes that evolution will lock alien organisms into a specific and static body configuration on other planets like it has done to organisms on Earth.

Is there any particular reason why an intelligent organism couldn't evolve to be able to grow and change its body into any arbitrary size and shape that it wanted to merely by thinking about it?

Perhaps aliens from another planet would consider our limitation as four limbed bipedal organisms to be absurd.

Why can't organisms chose to grow eight hands each with 16 opposable digits?

[zardo]

> This all pre-supposes that evolution will lock alien organisms into a specific and static body configuration on other planets like it has done to organisms on Earth.

It's pretty normal for organisms to have drastically different body configurations through their lives. e.g moths

Though I'm not aware of any that have choices to make in the process.

Edit: actually lots of organisms can "choose" to change their sex

[onlyrealcuzzo]

What about an octopus?

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Vs. tentacles with claws and suckers(with nice sensors embedded). As in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod