Streets of Hope

You may have seen this already, Leam, but this would certainly explain a lot behind the Void Weavers and their wild cousins.

https://boingboing.net/2018/05/15/scien ... -as-l.html

And thus, Lovecraft is vindicated. :D

Jokes aside, if panspermia is still seen as one viable explanation for Earth's microbial life kickstarting out of primordial ooze, I don't see why bigger asteroids couldn't have carried either one or two flash-frozen alien octopus eggs, or at least a few fragments of alien DNA that would've melded with Earth's primitive animal strains and given birth to the first cuttlefish and octopi.

As to their evolving "too quickly", that would check with the Hopeverse's explanation for anthros. In real-life terms, however, plenty of solid evolutionary states can be achieved in just a few million years. If the octopi and their cousins are still sticking to seperate cerebral nodes and mostly involuntary movement - and if it keeps them alive, on the whole - then it's a viable path.

Then there's the question of sentience, where I always thought that sticking to Humanity's model of consciousness as the only valid one was narrow-minded. Shit, bonobos have complex hierarchies, wage clan wars and eat the brains of smaller primates to compensate for an iron deficiency in their diet, and we don't classify them as sapient because durr, no theory of the mind or some shit...

Maybe the post-Freudian researchers' work isn't an exhaustive source, when it comes to understanding who is and isn't sapient.