If the sun shrimps environment is sufficiently complex to allow the evolution of intelligent life, I suspect that some form of technology is possible. Biotechnology if nothing else.
I suspect that, if you took the earth as it was a million years ago, and magically made every octopus in the ocean as smart as Von Neumann, there would be octopus technology. Give it a million years for civilization to develop, and there would probably be octopus ASI or an octopus dyson sphere or simiar.
No I don’t know every detail of their tech tree. If I had not learned them as history, I couldn’t figure out every detail of humanities tech tree from first principles.
Fire is somewhat helpful, and an important part of the path we took. It’s not the only possible basis of technology.
(On an alien planet, there might be a world where fire doesn’t work well because there is too little oxygen in the air. But also, geological processes cause the rocks to produce substantial amounts of electricity. One of their most primitive techs is a salty wet string, used to keep warm in winter if you don’t mind the smell of the hydrogen chloride. Slightly more sophisticated, but still primitive, the electrochemical refining of sodium. A metal much more useful in a low oxygen environment. And the aliens wonder how any technology could develop on worlds without this natural electricity)
You don’t need fire to make stone tools, weave baskets, spin cloths, etc. You don’t need fire in order to figure out Darwinian evolution and Mendelian inheritance and do selective breeding with a pretty clear idea of what you are doing.
There are probably all sorts of manufacturing techniques that can only be done with octopus tentacles underwater.
Eg it’s easy to move heavy stuff around by just strapping a few floats onto it. Creatures living on land would have a much harder time moving heavy stuff around, they would need to invent some kind of wheel or airship or something, and even then it wouldn’t be as good.
If the sun shrimps environment is sufficiently complex to allow the evolution of intelligent life, I suspect that some form of technology is possible. Biotechnology if nothing else.
I suspect that, if you took the earth as it was a million years ago, and magically made every octopus in the ocean as smart as Von Neumann, there would be octopus technology. Give it a million years for civilization to develop, and there would probably be octopus ASI or an octopus dyson sphere or simiar.
No I don’t know every detail of their tech tree. If I had not learned them as history, I couldn’t figure out every detail of humanities tech tree from first principles.
Fire is somewhat helpful, and an important part of the path we took. It’s not the only possible basis of technology.
(On an alien planet, there might be a world where fire doesn’t work well because there is too little oxygen in the air. But also, geological processes cause the rocks to produce substantial amounts of electricity. One of their most primitive techs is a salty wet string, used to keep warm in winter if you don’t mind the smell of the hydrogen chloride. Slightly more sophisticated, but still primitive, the electrochemical refining of sodium. A metal much more useful in a low oxygen environment. And the aliens wonder how any technology could develop on worlds without this natural electricity)
You don’t need fire to make stone tools, weave baskets, spin cloths, etc. You don’t need fire in order to figure out Darwinian evolution and Mendelian inheritance and do selective breeding with a pretty clear idea of what you are doing.
There are probably all sorts of manufacturing techniques that can only be done with octopus tentacles underwater.
Eg it’s easy to move heavy stuff around by just strapping a few floats onto it. Creatures living on land would have a much harder time moving heavy stuff around, they would need to invent some kind of wheel or airship or something, and even then it wouldn’t be as good.