Where are the Great Cephalopod Cities?

 In 1896, H.G. Wells published the short story “In the Abyss”, imagining the discovery of an intelligent humanoid species living in abyssal ocean depths.  Nearly a century later, James Cameron, perhaps borrowing the title, made the film “The Abyss”, also featuring the discovery of an intelligent humanoid species living in abyssal ocean depths.  Cameron’s creatures were phosphorescent tentacled beings, whose changing colors and patterns resemble various cephalopod species.

Cephalopods are as intelligent as most mammals.  So, where are the great cephalopod cites, in the present day or fossil record?  

 

Cephalopods first evolved in the late Cambrian to early Devonian age, about 485 million years ago.  The earliest forms were shelled, free-swimming predatory animals, similar to today’s nautilus.  Ammonites were the most common and diverse forms of cephalopod, with over 10,000 scientifically recognized species.  Ammonites flourished for about 345 million years in the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras before dying off due to the Chicxulub meteor impact 66 million years ago.  Along with ammonites, there were shelled cephalopods of various orders, including the older orthocerids and bactritids and younger belemnites, nautiloids and unshelled coleoids (squid, octopus & cuttlefish).  Coleoids and nautilus are still living today.  Together, these orders lived and evolved for nearly 500 million years.  

Cephalopods are mobile, predatory, relatively intelligent, and sexually competitive.  These are all characteristics which would seem to predispose them to the development of tools and weapons, which might then lead to construction of protective housing, other technology and culture.  Why don’t octopuses use little spears to hunt?  Where are the ammonite spearheads in the fossil record?  Where are the great cephalopod cities?

Today’s octopuses are surprisingly intelligent but have limitations which might prevent the development of technology.  First, octopuses have very short lives.  Second, they are solitary by nature, and are less likely to synergize ideas with fellow octopuses.  Third, they die before maturation of their young, which prohibits transmission and propagation of culture and technology.  Squids, however, are social, and possibly even communicate with each other using color-changing patterns on their bodies.  Why didn’t squids develop some kind of tool-using technology?

Cephalopods are reasonably brainy and have the physical ability to manipulate their environment.  They had 500 million years to develop even the most basic technology.  Why didn’t they develop spears for hunting and huts for protection?  

Obviously, the question is not specific to cephalopods.  Where are the dinosaur firepits, arrowheads and spearheads?  The fossil record is certainly more than adequate to reveal these, if they existed.  Where are the dinosaur huts, stone monuments, pyramids and cell phones in the fossil record?  Dinosaurs had 175 million years of abundant evolutionary diversification across a wide range of inhabited environments.  If the obstacle to cephalopod cities was the lack of fire, why didn’t dinosaurs succeed where the cephalopods failed?  Why are hominids the only creatures in the history of life on earth to develop logical language, culture and technology?

Conclusion
This essay is really about the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and the place of humankind in the universe.  We don’t need to search distant stars to find Fermi’s Paradox.  We can look at our own planet through deep time, where many species lived and died without developing even the beginnings of technological civilization.  

The development of technological intelligence is extraordinarily rare, even when evolutionary conditions seem to predispose life toward that development.  Perhaps as Darwin speculated with keen insight, human intelligence is a fluke of sexual selection, as unique and improbable as a peacock’s tail.  Perhaps it is a result of a particular set of conditions involving tree-dwelling social creatures making a transition to life on the grasslands.  Even within the hominids, homo sapiens is an outlier, the only species that progressed beyond the stone age after nearly three million years of evolution involving dozens of hominid species.  Perhaps humans’ ability to develop technology beyond stone tools is due to the abundance of metals in the Earth’s crust, which resulted from the improbable collision of the Earth and a Mars-sized planet named Theia.

We know the history of one planet very well.  Although this planet did produce a technologically capable species, that development took an inordinately long time.  Across geologic time, numerous species were pre-adapted to technological development, having reasonable intelligence, the ability to manipulate objects, sexual competition and social behaviors.   But these species failed to make the transition to technological sentience.  No species other than humans has systematically made durable tools, constructed shelters, stored and used energy, created language capable of logical statements and developed societies.  

In the history of our planet, only humans developed social and technological sentience.  
In any meaningful way, humans are unique and alone. 
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The image of a cephalopod city was created by AI.