So long and thanks for all the fish
this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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Surprised they’re still here tbh, mice too
What about mice?
They're already behind the scenes pulling the strings. If swear there was already a documentary novel series and film about this.
The trouble with trying to hitch a ride is, the mice plan to stick around and see the end while the dolphins and I have different environmental needs like water and air. It’s not easy getting off this rock
IT WAS EARTH ALL ALONG!
You like rats? Play plagues tale. Then you'll think. Yeah, we might be fucked.
I think we're really underselling raccoons here.
That’s now how you spell “crows”!
I think you mean rats/mice
I'll grant they are pretty sick lil dudes.
They wish. They aren't building shit with those flippers. It's absolutely the cephalopods next. Dolphins might be like the horses to the octopus.
Crows. They can manipulate objects solve problems and can do math and understand simple geometry. They also hold grudges and can fucking fly. It's 100% gonna be crows.
You underestimate how important hands are to the human dominance. Cephalopods have tentacles, and 8 of them. That's the only thing even slightly comparable to hands. Beaks and bird feet developing industry? Not happening.
While dolphins and crows are as intelligent as your average American, they simply lack the means to manipulate the world in a way that leads to technological development.
That's fair but cephalopods are missing out on a huge chunk of habitat space by not having bones. Yes the oceans are ~70% of the surface area, but a very significant amount of that is barren. And without bones, they can't get the force required to mine anything to make industry. I also understand that we're not talking about animals in their current form, but allowing for some amount of evolution? Well birds wings are closer evolutionarily to hands than tentacles.
You fundamentaly misunderstand evolution if you think a bird wing would evolve into a hand.
You're thinking about it like intelligent design. This would be a good idea, so it will surely happen.
Evolution requires many generations of slight variations each being slightly beneficial over the last.
Crows would sooner develop hand like feet than lose their wings.
Edit:
Also, we're talking about mining? Let's put a crow wing and octopus tentacle in an arm wrestling match. The octopus crushes the whole crow, bones and all, with one tentacle. It's not even close. Birds are fucking fragile.
Yeah crush, but not hit. You need to hit things to mine in early tech trees. And hitting things in water is very difficult.
Why wouldn't a wing turn into a hand? Birds have become flightless many times throughout their history. Once flightless, the wing is completely open to evolutionary changes, it's absolutely reasonable to think that a bird that isn't using its wings for flight could mutate in such a way that's beneficial for other things.
They actually wouldn't even need to mine, humans have already done most of that already. They just need to salvage.
What could they get? Old rusted oil rig parts? They're not capable of living on land and stuff corrodes quickly in salt water without maintenance. They're not strong enough, dextrous enough or smart enough to get items in shipping containers with a padlock.
They are absolutely smart and dexterous enough.
That's a good point about the sea corroding everything though, they'd have to move to land for industry.
It would start with farming. They already use tools, building fish and mollusc farms would be a likely start.
They can scurry across land in short bursts already. Bringing salt so they can explore freshwater streams and rivers seems possible. Digging canals they can travel in up further into the land seems possible.
This is starting to feel more and more like the lion/tuna conversation in "the other guys"
I paid crows to pass all my calculus classes in college.
The cephalopodes have a word to say here...
And the fucking whales too
Well, there's already a dolphin in the photo, AFAIK all the others are calmer...
All the smart whales are dolphins.
World dominate our floating plastic waste garbage. See you in hell, beautiful misunderstood creature.
Dolphins ain't got shit! Flipper-ass sombitches! Let's see you grasp tools without opposable thumbs! Boom, headshot. Gottem.
Has anyone given a dolphin DMT?
S O O N
We are all just shuttles doing the bidding of the microbes
No complex language; no dexterous digits? I'm sorry to say that dolphin dominance is DOA.
This dolphin and what it says reminds me of Sodal Ye from the Hothouse sci-fi novel.