I assume they are just biding their time before they take over once and for all.
And I, for one, welcome our new octoterrestrial overlords. I’d like to remind them as someone who can play the chords to Ringo’s song, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underwater shell gardens.
They’ve already built undersea cities such as Octlantis and Octopolis.
Well, if it wasn’t space then it seems the only other possibility is a different dimension.
squints
I suppose typing with tentacles is pretty easy actually. Good ‘human’ cover name though, you’ve done your research.
Sounds just like something an eight tentacled alien overlord would say!
How’s your ink sac?
At least, when done right, these overlords are downright tasty.
Y’know, that was my initial reaction, but the very fact that it got published in a peer-reviewed journal like Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology suggests that it’s not as bonkers as it first appears. I haven’t had a chance to read more than the intro yet, but it looks like it might be interesting.
Note that both the press and the nay-sayers have focused on the most outrageous aspect of the story, that octopuses might be alien. But the article as a whole is a serious review of scientific ideas, in particular Panspermia, the idea that terrestrial life might have originated elsewhere. This would explain one of the great anomalies of the history of life on Earth, that it seems to have originated as soon as the surface was cool enough for it to survive.
I’m old enough to remember when the idea of Continental Drift was ridiculed, before Plate Tectonics was vindicated. So loony ideas sometimes turn out to be true.
No, it’s completely bonkers.
They talk about alien octopus eggs quite a bit. And that discredits everything. Are you going to give serious consideration to a paper that only spends two pages proposing that the earth is flat? Anyone who proposes alien octopus eggs is completely ignorant of a lot of basic undergraduate-level science.
As with every other species we have ever discovered, the octopus contains vast amounts of genetic material that indisputably shows common ancestry with all other life on earth. The fact that there is also some evolutionary novelty does not remotely bring that common ancestry into question.
The idea that octopus eggs came from outer space makes about as much sense as Captain Kirk landing on a planet in another galaxy and encountering aliens that speak colloquial 20th century English with an American accent. The fact that they may also have blue skin does not make it a plausible portrayal of aliens.
I can’t believe the paper passed peer review. I would have assumed that it was simply a prank.
From the conclusion of the paper:
Also, if you aren’t familiar with the nutcase
Chandra Wickramasinghe, Chandra Wickramasinghe is a nutcase. The guy sees alien life raining down on Earth everywhere he looks and has been a laughingstock for decades. I could come up with many examples, but I’m on my phone right now so here are only four.
The journal is generally peer-reviewed but this particular article is labeled as a review article, not original research. My understanding is that review articles don’t always get the peer-review treatment even in journals where original research does. I haven’t been able to figure out whether this article was peer-reviewed.
Another look into the mind of one of the paper’s authors.
This paper was really a foolish step for the authors. The idea that some novel genetic elements might have arrived from space and been introduced by horizontal transfer is possible (although there no convincing evidence that it happened, or that it’s more likely than the evolution of all novelty on earth). But the idea that an entire organism arrived from outer space is utter nonsense, because it cannot explain all the material in the genome that shows common ancestry with all other life on earth. The authors don’t address this obvious objection, and it undermines the credibility of any other potentially more plausible ideas that they might offer.
“We don’t know. Therefore: aliens” is science in the same way that “It turned out to be a dream the whole time” is literature.
So…Cephalopods AREN’T the result of Cthulhu sowing his wild oats when he came to Earth?
Bummer.
To expand - when Continental Drift was proposed, there was no known mechanism that could have caused it. The discovery of Plate Tectonics came later and proved to be the mechanism.
And for anyone worried about octopodes taking over, consider that most of them die as soon as they reproduce. Poor things.
It has long been my opinion that they are Cthulhu’s wild oats. A pubescent Cthulhu, a dark ocean and a copy of [del]Girls[/del] [del]Females[/del] Entities of the Aethereal Plane vol.666
If I’m understanding Riemann correctly
your proposal is actually more plausible than the one advanced in the OP.