5 Reasons We’ll Never Meet Space Aliens That Look Like Octopuses

Often portrayed by Hollywood as potential competitors and even threats to humans, both the marine dwellings and the fictional octopuses of the world have made many viewers shudder in terror. Aside from their piercing eyes, their brains and morphology are as different from humans as any species could be.

But because they evolved hundreds of millions of years before Homo sapiens was even a twinkle in Earth’s evolutionary eye, their study is inherently valuable in trying to understand alternative pathways to intelligence. Such research should also help to understand what kind of sentient aliens we Earthlings may eventually encounter in our search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

However, the octopus has a few things going for it, so it’s highly unlikely that we’ll ever meet octopus-like space aliens. Here are some reasons.

Their blood is rich in copper.

Octopuses’ big failing lies in their copper-based blood, Peter Ward, an author and paleontologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, told me by phone. It doesn’t hold as much oxygen as iron-based blood like ours, Ward told me. They have such giant minds that they are always on the verge of oxygen starvation, he says. And their brains can’t get bigger because they can’t get enough oxygen to support it, he says.

Why did they turn to copper instead of iron?

There was iron, but naturally, they found it advantageous to use copper, Ward says. And it may have had nothing to do with iron bioavailability, he says. Instead, it might be based entirely on what proteins were available and how their physiology already worked, Ward notes.

You would never guess that the octopus we know today began its evolution about 500 million years ago from simple snail-like creatures.

But there is the rub.

Copper works great for a tiny snail because they never get much exercise, Ward says. However, because the octopus evolved from these tiny snail-like creatures, they are stuck with brains that are always on the verge of oxygen starvation, he says.

Their lifespan is incredibly short.

The average lifespan of the octopus is no more than three years, and their average longevity is only two years, Ward says. They also have the fastest growth rate of almost any animal we know, he says.

But octopuses have too short an individual lifespan to fully develop mentally.

Even so, cephalopods — the taxon to which octopuses belong — have much larger nervous systems than any other invertebrate, writes Peter Godfrey-Smith in his 2017 book Other minds: The octopus and the evolution of intelligent life. A common eight-armed octopus (Octopus vulgaris) has about 500 million neurons in its body, close to the range of dogs, Godfrey-Smith writes.

Like two-year-olds, they don’t have any life experience, Ward says. Take people this age and tell me if they’re “smart,” he asks. Sure, they’re starting to talk, he says, but what two-year-old can build a radio telescope or a rocket? Octopuses never live long enough to have enough experience to really use their innate intelligence, Ward says, and that’s one of nature’s greatest tragedies.

Octopuses are solitary and never cooperative.

They would need culture, social learning and the ability to cooperate to advance in any kind of culture, Godfrey-Smith, a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney in Australia, told me via email. They show a different blueprint for a mind, but probably not a basis on which civilization and technology would easily emerge, he says.

Technology development requires collaboration.

You don’t see any social interaction between them other than fighting, Ward says. But they don’t really seem to have any kind of social hierarchy, he says.

Cephalopods tend to be cannibals.

These guys are just voracious carnivores, if they come across a very small specimen of their species, they’ll eat it right away, Ward says. But their prey is almost entirely crustaceans, he says.

Such creatures rarely form societies, Ward says.

Technological development is almost impossible underwater.

Ward wonders how they could melt metals to make machines and computers and astronomical instruments? As he says: No fire, no metals, no spaceships. It takes a village to build a spaceship, says Ward.

And even if there are intelligent octopus-like aliens on a terrestrial water world orbiting a solar-type star, we’d probably have to go there to find out.

We would encounter alien cephalopods traveling there, rather than coming to us, says Godfrey-Smith.