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:
Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, who is sceptical (octopuses don’t inherit culture enough)
The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler, fiction, in which octopuses are uplifted to consciousness.
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.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it by email or on social media. Here’s the link. Thanks, —Matt.
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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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.