I often wonder what it felt like for the ancient Greeks, circa 800BC, to be wandering in the ruins of the previous Mycenaean civilisation. These cities they can no longer build; staring at writing they can’t read. The Greeks had to re-discover literacy.
I think perhaps they wouldn’t have known what they were looking at.
I know that dinosaurs aren’t our ancestors but… it’s adjacent? We live in a world of humbled kings. Birds were once dinosaurs. Don’t you suppose that, given the chance, they would again rouse themselves?
When they look at you with their beady eyes, what are they thinking?
The dinosaurs didn’t have a techno-industrial civilisation though. Not that we’d know. That’s the thought experiment of the Silurian hypothesis, as previously discussed: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?
Squid. Octopus. Cuttlefish. There have been a bunch of books recently about cephalopods as terrestrial aliens… the quiet implication being that they could one day rise to civilisation.
For instance:
What if cephalopods already had their complex societies?
Read: The Silurian Hypothesis: It was the Cephalopods by Dr. Klaus M. Stiefel.
This is a magical article. (Hat tip to Clive Thompson’s Linkfest.)
The argument is that cephalopods are super sophisticated:
Cuttlefish hunt by seemingly hypnotizing crabs by generating highly psychedelic moving stripe patterns on their bodies
And tool users:
There is even an octopus named after its tool use, the coconut octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus).
And language users:
there is a very sophisticated communication system between cephalopods, based on color and pattern changes in their skins
But they get eaten too much by fish.
So what about BEFORE FISH?
Sometime in the late Cambrian, the first geological epoch with diverse animals with complex bodies, the Nautiluses evolved, primitive cephalopods with less well-developed nervous systems and larger numbers of simpler tentacles …
From these still somewhat primitive animals evolved the giant shelled Ammonites, and the modern cephalopods (the “Coleoids”), which include the cuttlefish, octopi, squid … the animals with fast propulsion via contraction of a water-filled body cavity, fine motor control of their arms and hunting tentacles, keen senses, good memory, skin-pattern-based communication, social lives and sophisticated mating rituals.
And so:
A crucial window where cephalopod civilization could have occurred is the time between when mentally high-performing cephalopods came to their own, and the time when aquatic vertebrates really took over.
That window is between the ammonites in the Triassic, and the emergence of modern fishes in the late Cretaceous… 55 million years.
It is a wild idea that we’re not saying: oh yeah these cephalopod things are in the early days of having a civilisation. But instead: yeah they had a civilisation and then it went and now these are the rump beasts.
Maybe the crab-hypnotising skin was biotech once upon a time.
Maybe that’s the Silurian techno-signature we’ve been looking for.
The ascent of planetary civilisation and then a quiescent period all the way back to sub-sentience.
It’s very Last and First Men (Wikipedia) – Olaf Stapledon’s 2 billion year future history from 1930 about rise and fall of eighteen human species (we’re the first).
If you recall, the Eighth Men escape Venus by engineering a new human species to inhabit Neptune, but it collapses, and the Ninth Men splinter into all kinds of beasts.
Certainly strange vestiges of human mentality did indeed persist here and there even as, in the fore-limbs of most species, there still remained buried the relics of man’s once cunning fingers. For instance, there were certain grazers which in times of hardship would meet together and give tongue in cacophonous ululation; or, sitting on their haunches with forelimbs pressed together, they would listen by the hour to the howls of some leader, responding intermittently with groans and whimpers, and working themselves at last into foaming madness.
(That’s the full text at Project Gutenberg.)
It takes 300 million years but they claw their way back via a rabbit-like species to become the Tenth Men. Then all die in a plague.
It works out. By the end of the book (SPOILERS) humans are vegetarian, there are 96 sexes, and they live to a quarter million years of age. They have six legs and an eye on the top of their heads, and the race is telepathic. They can join themselves together into a huge Neptune-wide telescope, just by looking up.
I think we often pattern-match to “progress” because that (a) matches what the exponential looks like from our perspective in the Anthropocene, and that means we’re inclined to look for the progress of octopuses; and (b) we centre ourselves, humans, in the historical story, because of course.
But maybe we’re not the main character here.
So it’s odd to think about humanity as a temporary flourishing between the peaks of somebody else’s civilisation, whether it’s cephalopods or dinosaurs.
Birds are just little Napoleons, exiled on their St. Helena of deep time, before they make their vengeful return. Octopus patiently biding their time until the fish clear off again. And here we are, just keeping the seat warm.
Meanwhile whoever - whatever mysterious force - first assembled the yeasts, those microscopic Drexler assemblers; it was a techno-industrial society with such abundance that its means of production still litter the Earth today; all of us await its eventual return.
I often wonder what it felt like for the ancient Greeks, circa 800BC, to be wandering in the ruins of the previous Mycenaean civilisation. These cities they can no longer build; staring at writing they can’t read. The Greeks had to re-discover literacy.
I think perhaps they wouldn’t have known what they were looking at.
I know that dinosaurs aren’t our ancestors but… it’s adjacent? We live in a world of humbled kings. Birds were once dinosaurs. Don’t you suppose that, given the chance, they would again rouse themselves?
When they look at you with their beady eyes, what are they thinking?
The dinosaurs didn’t have a techno-industrial civilisation though. Not that we’d know. That’s the thought experiment of the Silurian hypothesis, as previously discussed:
Squid. Octopus. Cuttlefish. There have been a bunch of books recently about cephalopods as terrestrial aliens… the quiet implication being that they could one day rise to civilisation.
For instance:
What if cephalopods already had their complex societies?
Read: The Silurian Hypothesis: It was the Cephalopods by Dr. Klaus M. Stiefel.
This is a magical article. (Hat tip to Clive Thompson’s Linkfest.)
The argument is that cephalopods are super sophisticated:
And tool users:
And language users:
But they get eaten too much by fish.
So what about BEFORE FISH?
And so:
That window is between the ammonites in the Triassic, and the emergence of modern fishes in the late Cretaceous… 55 million years.
It is a wild idea that we’re not saying: oh yeah these cephalopod things are in the early days of having a civilisation. But instead: yeah they had a civilisation and then it went and now these are the rump beasts.
Maybe the crab-hypnotising skin was biotech once upon a time.
Maybe that’s the Silurian techno-signature we’ve been looking for.
The ascent of planetary civilisation and then a quiescent period all the way back to sub-sentience.
It’s very Last and First Men (Wikipedia) – Olaf Stapledon’s 2 billion year future history from 1930 about rise and fall of eighteen human species (we’re the first).
If you recall, the Eighth Men escape Venus by engineering a new human species to inhabit Neptune, but it collapses, and the Ninth Men splinter into all kinds of beasts.
(That’s the full text at Project Gutenberg.)
It takes 300 million years but they claw their way back via a rabbit-like species to become the Tenth Men. Then all die in a plague.
It works out. By the end of the book (SPOILERS) humans are vegetarian, there are 96 sexes, and they live to a quarter million years of age. They have six legs and an eye on the top of their heads, and the race is telepathic. They can join themselves together into a huge Neptune-wide telescope, just by looking up.
I think we often pattern-match to “progress” because that (a) matches what the exponential looks like from our perspective in the Anthropocene, and that means we’re inclined to look for the progress of octopuses; and (b) we centre ourselves, humans, in the historical story, because of course.
But maybe we’re not the main character here.
So it’s odd to think about humanity as a temporary flourishing between the peaks of somebody else’s civilisation, whether it’s cephalopods or dinosaurs.
Birds are just little Napoleons, exiled on their St. Helena of deep time, before they make their vengeful return. Octopus patiently biding their time until the fish clear off again. And here we are, just keeping the seat warm.
Meanwhile whoever - whatever mysterious force - first assembled the yeasts, those microscopic Drexler assemblers; it was a techno-industrial society with such abundance that its means of production still litter the Earth today; all of us await its eventual return.