His answer is the octopus. What say you?
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this exact subject, and I dunno. As much as I consider it, as abstractly as possible, I have considerable difficulty finding an alternate route to significant human-like dominance. Fire and metallurgy are just so incredibly useful across so many domains. I challenge you to present a reasonable alternative route.
Yeah, but we did all of our discoveries as a land-based species. It’s totally possible some water-based species would find other crazy useful early techniques, then eventually discover stuff like “fire” much further down the line with access to more robust technologies. Their scientific roadmap would look very different from ours, but there are so many weird tricks and techniques that would eventually lead towards some of the dominating processes we have.
