There is a comment below by biztos imagining that if octopi lived longer, they would be the apex species that was failing to fight the climate change - in place of humans.
Made me think that maybe they were at one point, and then the octopus civilization itself decided to "solve the problem" by engineering a shorter time-to-live into their species and preventing intelligent behavior :)
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/
it's 1982's "the thing", from the perspective of the, well, thing :)
The original limits were symmetrical. They just haven't yet noticed humans started living long enough to develop into a technological species.
If you eliminate a radial intelligence somewhere they eliminate an axial intelligence somewhere. Roundabout hindering them is clearly allowed.
It may even have been a compensation for the seemingly barren corner of the galaxy we're in.
Like, even for giant octopus? How do they get so large, in such a short amount of time?
Usual adult giant octopuses are similar (in weight) to 3 year old humans, so it's not really surprising they get that big over a 3-5 year lifespan.
But their potential is cut short by their incredibly short lives (like 5? years at the higher end) which seem to be caused by a very bizarre self-destructive behavior after mating (starving themselves, eating their own arms), which in turn is caused by an "optic gland" and removing that gland completely eliminates that self-destructiveness and increases their lifespan.
It makes you wonder if that gland was artificially engineered into them.
The sci-fi nerd in me likes to think there is a cosmic conflict between axial-symmetry species and radial-symmetry species, which may be overall more common in the universe given how life evolves at the microscopic scale, and Earth was chosen to give apes a chance.