i know they wouldn’t be able to hold stuff in hands but couldent they hold them in thier tail or mouth or something like that
In Spore creatures just hold things with their mouths so…
Would they be able to efficiently use tools? That’s kind of an important evolutionary step towards space technology.
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Birds like parrots are able to hold some things with their feet, so that may work for some creatures.
As long as it can manipulate objects it should work
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You can use tentacles
Is… Is that a threat?
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No, I just wanted to tell him that tentacles are hands without bones.
I’m on mobile but if anyone can scrounge up my thread on the old forum on sapience, you can find that it sort of addressed this
You mean this thread? Because there wasn’t really a final conclusion about manipulatory limbs, just people that thought “hands” meant literal human hands and suggesting tentacles and such as counter-argument, and you responding with “ffs I didn’t mean literal human hands, just ways to manipulate the environment”
what about prehensile tails?
That could work, just matters how easily it can use tools
the real question is how well they can make tools
FYI ffs means for funnies sake
move things with your mind powers
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One cool idea someone had ages ago was that when you’re making a creature you have to put a bit of brain in to control any controllable part. So a flipper might need a small motor control area devoted to it, a hand might need a lot more, eyes would need loads. You could even upgrade the part by upgrading the brain.
Would make it an interesting tradeoff, for example if you stay armless you can afford to spend more brains on other stuff, like amazing vision and language skills or something. If you choose to have 20 arms with hands on each one that means you need a mega brain just to control them all which costs loads of calories to run making things hard.
Not sure if we’ll go down that route, sounds interesting I think.
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Don’t octopi have neurons in their “arms” that reduce the load on their central brain? Something like that would be cool. Though, still the neurons would take the same amount of energy to operate, no matter where they are.
Am I the only one who saw this and immediately thought of elephants? They have a very powerful yet delicate trunk, which is capable of precise movement. I can imagine a society of smart elephant villages.
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Yeah I think they do have distributed arm control. It’s really interesting, I guess they just send the idea of what they want the tentacle to do and then hope it does it vaguely right.
I guess we have a bit of the same thing with autonomous reflexes.
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