Aliens Alive and Well on Earth

To look for aliens, most people peer towards the sky. But if you look down, you'll discover they already live among us.

These aliens have brains, like we do, but they're mostly inside their arms, and each arm acts as if it has a mind of its own.I'm speaking, of course, of the octopus. This tentacled beast – along with its cephalopod relatives, the squid and cuttlefish – are some of the strangest, most alien creatures on our planet.

Scientists have a hard enough time getting into the minds of our nearest relatives, the apes and monkeys, let alone more distantly related mammals like dolphins or elephants. Octopuses? Forget about it. Our last common ancestor with the octopus was probably around 800 million years ago. So while we know they are capable of squeezing through holes the size of an inch, opening jars, and disguising themselves, there’s a great deal that mystifies us about how and why the octopus could develop a brain unlike that of almost any other intelligent creature.

Each octopus arm contains some 40 million receptors, mostly along the rims of each sucker, which the octopus uses both for touch, as well as for detecting chemicals in a similar manner to our senses of taste and smell. Imagine what it would be like if the majority of your body were made of tongues, able to both touch and taste the entire world, and you might come a step closer to understanding life as an octopus.