Peter Godfrey Smith has a great summary of this in "Other Minds":

> Why should an organism devote all its resources to one brood, or one breeding season? Much depends, again, on the risk of death by predation and other external causes—especially on how this risk changes over an animal’s lifetime. Suppose in some animal the juvenile stage is risky, but once you get to be an adult, you can expect to live for a while without being eaten. Then it makes sense for adults to reproduce more than once. That applies to fish and many mammals. If, on the other hand, the adult life stage is very risky, it might make more sense to “go for broke” as soon as you get to a stage where you can breed. Seasons also play a role. There might be a good season for laying eggs, or for hatching. That will determine a timetable within each year; perhaps it makes sense to mate in spring, or in winter. Then the question becomes: During how many years should you try to reproduce? Initially it might seem obvious that there is no harm in leaving it open, at least, that you will be around for another couple of years. You might make it through. Why fall apart in the meantime? But here the Williams argument returns, along with the need to think about these evolutionary questions by considering vast numbers of individuals and many generations. In the abstract, you would like to live and mate forever—at least from an evolutionary point of view. But who will leave more descendants, an organism which spends everything on one mating season, or a rival which spends less now in the hope of reproducing again later? If you spend less now to save something for later, that will do you no good if animals of your kind have little chance of making it to the next breeding season. In that case, it is better to put everything into one mating season, embracing all the options which give you an advantage now, even at the cost of breakdown once the season is done.

Such a great book! I thought the whole section on why we age was compelling. The idea that nature can select for mutations which may be beneficial earlier on but have harmful effects after a given time period was new to me.

Given their intelligence, one wonders what they would be like if they lived say 20 years? Would they be ruling the oceans?

Especially true since living longer often means helping to raise and teach children - passing on knowledge.

Many land animals are intelligent and raise children so it's not clearly the only requirement for advanced development.

....they do certainly have the finger like dexterity for fine object control though.

If you like sci-fi, Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky plays with this concept. It's the second book in a series though, first being Children of Time.

Super imaginative and well written, I really liked them.

I've wondered this, too. If they lived long enough after the new generation is born, they might've developed language or some other communication system.

I thought they communicated via semaphore? Their cousins the cuttlefish certainly do.

One researcher has seen "communication" in one species of octopus, but it's mostly looking big and dark to drive away others, or small and light before being driven away[0]. It's a very primitive communication, like rattlesnakes do to scare away dangers. Not the kind of complex system I was thinking of.

I'm being very human-centric, though. It just seems like if they're intelligent enough to recognize individual faces, use tools, and learn from what other octopi do, a complex language would be inevitable. And from there they'd accrue oral histories and localized cultures.

[0] https://www.livescience.com/53514-octopuses-lead-social-live...

Their reproduction strategy would have to change, when you produce 100,000 eggs and die taking care of them there’s not much chance to develop culture.

I highly recommend the Netflix documentary ’My Octopus Teacher‘. This is the story of a photographer diving everyday for a year, and developing a two way bond with an octopus.

maybe self destroy their own species and so only the short lived one persist

I find this amusing as this is an inherently human emotional evaluation. Perhaps that is not the point in the grand scheme of things?

Octopuses have survived for 500+ millions of years and I would say more intelligent and peaceful than humans who 'ruled' or savaged their own species for... what benefit actually?

A viable chance at getting off this rock.

500+ million years is a blink of an eye on a cosmic scale. Humans are the only species we’ve observed that has a viable chance or surviving on cosmic time scales; and we will likely bring other life along with us for that ride.

Short of another human-equivalent species evolving, or a hyper resilient organism that can piggy back on space debris, humans are literally the only shot life on Earth has.

> 500+ million years is a blink of an eye on a cosmic scale.

How so? It’s 1/8 of the lifespan of the planet and about 3.5% of the age of the universe.

That is not “a blink of an eye”, that’s a pretty impressive innings by any definition.

Humans will be lucky if we make 1 million years at this rate.

Well, according to the Big Freeze theory (seems to be the most probable) 500 million years is less than a blink of an eye when compared to the time the universe will consume until it cannot anymore.

Why does that matter? Why are humans so special? I 'feel' like octopuses are the better candidate :) putting aside trivial human aspirations....

When they successfully escape earths orbit, get back to me.

Until then, all odds are stacked against them. They’re going to go extinct in an instant on a cosmic timescale. Unless, of course, humans choose to bring them along and save them from that fate.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but it's interesting to me that in our many hundred thousand year history as a species, the "point" of our intelligence (by your measure) wasn't even a suggestion until maybe 120 years ago, and only a dream until maybe 60 years ago. What are the chances?

Perhaps a scholar in 320 AD would also have been surprised by how remarkable it was that the true purpose of human intelligence had only been so recently discovered.

Bingo.

This is the chasm that needs to be crossed. Its not just the immediate advantage your species gets from intelligence. It’s cultivating that to a point where you realize all life on this planet is default extinct. Then getting your species to the point where you even have a _chance_ of changing that default.

Humans are still default extinct. We are on a path to changing that default.

No we're not, at best we're just changing the timeline. You're still either time bound by the death of the universe best case scenario or resource bound before that happens (if the universe can "end"). Extinction is inevitable at any timescale.

Well the whole point of the game of life is to keep the game going for as long as possible.

to follow up on the point above, how do you know that leaving earth is the only way to escape extinction? that's only what you can imagine given the technology available, just like someone living in 320 couldn't conceive of space travel.

I agree that the ultimate purpose of any species is to continue to exist. I'm just skeptical because your definition of that is so related to modern science fiction

I mean eventually the sun will lose energy and hell, a planet destroying asteroid could hit at any time.

One response from the Christian tradition is that humans are creatures made in the image of God with rational, moral, and spiritual faculties. Other animals lack these faculties. Furthermore, we are decreed to be stewards over the created order by divine command.

Christianity decrees its followers to be stewards over the created order, but outside of some small groups, there's no major tradition of vegetarianism in Christianity, nor any particular care for ecology and sustainability as is practiced in many other religions.

Because stewardship of the earth got translated into dominion over it and that became the dominant narrative in a dominant branch of Christianity in most of the world (Evangelicalism).

Dinosaurs perished to become oil to power our technology, they deserve some credit.

It was mostly the plant species alive in that time, not dinosaurs per se.

> viable chance or surviving on cosmic time scales

how incredibly arrogant.

Arrogant is a tremendous understatement. There's a chance that 10 million years ago on some other planet existed a far more advanced civilization than humans could ever imagine, but they died out after 1 million years. So they would have had 1 million years of advancement, which is still 50 times more advancement than the 2000 or so years of scientific progress we've had, and even that would be but a tiny tiny tiny fraction of a blink of an eye in space and time. To think that "humans have a viable chance of surviving cosmic time" is incredulous if you know even rudimentary physics.

I would prefer ambitious.

I'm not sure about the 'peaceful' claim, that seems to me to be something of a romanticism. It's called the 'law of the jungle' for a reason, after all, e.g. -

https://www.livescience.com/47982-octopus-cannibalism-video-...

But I think it's true that human intelligence has made us have a greater impact on the world, both for good and for evil.

I've been wondering if their short lifespan is in any way related to cephalopods' recently discovered use of RNA editing techniques[1].

[1] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)30344-6

I have often wondered about this aspect of lifespan. Octopuses are amazing.

Perhaps their relatively short lifespan and lifecycle after mating is somehow correlated with them being around for 500+ million years. Somehow I find that more fascinating.

I feel like humans are inherently lower on this scale: we definitely live longer but I wonder as a species if we would be better off with shorter lifespan (and life cycle) like octopuses that helps the entire human species survive (peacefully?) as opposed to an optimization around single individual lifespan.

That seems rather bleak and somewhat Malthusian. I'm further perplexed by the idea that anti-individualism or some sort of collectivism would be "better for us". Historically, collectivist thinking hasn't been positive for anyone who's interests fall outside of the narrow interests of those in power.

Definitely collectivism is not good for anyone not following the goals of the collective. The idea that collectivism is "better for us" is a collective point of view, that doing something optimal for the most of us is better than doing something suboptimal for all of us. Collective thinking has many positive and negative examples, often both in the same example. One with a high positive side is the rise from devastation of post-Korean War South Korea to the powerhouse it is today in about 50 years, and this considering that South Korea has very few natural resources, so the only resource they can count on was manpower.

> Historically, collectivist thinking hasn't been positive for anyone who's interests fall outside of the narrow interests of those in power.

Doesn't that really depend on your choice of examples? I could for example point to the Montreal protocol as a highly successful example of collectivist thinking that has been hugely positive for basically everyone, perhaps outside of a narrow few in the refrigerants industry.

The Montreal protocol is really narrow, and addresses the commons in a way that benefits everyone everywhere in a narrow and specific way (reduced ozone depletion), while only requiring a switch to a slightly more expensive/less efficient replacements for CFC and HFCs.

I'm clearly not arguing against environmental protection. Im arguing against the nebulous idea of "the good of society (species as in the grandparent post)" vs protection of individual rights.

There are degrees of collectivism and collective action though.

The mere fact we roughly agree (via cultural norms moreso than law) to more or less respect a core set of individual rights is itself a collective act. We don't live in Hobbsian war-of-all after all.

And pretty much every human society at this point has governments that tax in order to provide services for the "good of society" (granted with many different degrees of success).

I still wouldn't want to live in a fascist or soviet style state though, if that is your point. Fully subsuming the will of the individual to the goals of the state is personally abhorrent to me and my values, but I can certainly imagine other value-sets where a more collectivists society is better able to achieve those values.

And yet firms collect individuals together to extract the surplus profit from them for those in power.

Human life spans are driven by the fact that newborn humans need the support of their parents to survive until they reach sexual maturity. So there is selective pressure on humans to live just long enough to see their grandchildren born and not much longer. Octopi don't have that constraint. They just need to reproduce, then they're done.

Actually not. Octopuses (female) breed their young for months without eating and then die off. Seems like they have perfected this system over millenia via evolution?

Humans being of the few animals that go through menopause is strong evidence that grandmothers contribute to the survival of their grandchildren.

One thing that occurs to me is for a social creature, a long life span allows knowledge that is passed on. But if an intelligent species wasn't a social species, then it's hard to see the value of a long life span.

I wonder if animals are aware of their own mortality. How would you test this?

I imagine it's a very small number, likely including elephants and great apes. However, even I struggle to grasp the concept of my own mortality. I feel like most people are in the same situation. They can tell you they're going to die one day, like they're reciting lines from a book, but they don't seem to truly grasp what it means.

Elephants could easily be aware of their own mortality. They are social, long-lived, and have been filmed interacting in an interesting way with elephant bones. There was a nice article on elephants posted here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828113

One way is to see which animals have self-awareness or have a sense of self. But that test is difficult because we can only rely upon our human-biased perspective and hence any test we developed will be skewed towards our way of thinking/being. For example the mirror test works well for humans, but what about animals that rely mostly on smell, sound, etc?

But even if they are self-aware it doesn't necessarily mean they would be aware of their own mortality. It's assumed that most, if not all animals, live "in the moment". So it's hard to imagine an animal that always lives in the moment to think about their own mortality.

It's mostly likely that most animals aren't aware of their mortality and they don't even have the capacity to even consider it. It would be like wondering whether an ant understands calculus. They simply lack the capacity.

And finally, what evolutionary benefit does the awareness of their mortality confer on any animal? In nature, where competition is fierce and unforgiving, I doubt animals who dwell upon their own mortality outcompete those that live in the moment.