[Unknown, Misidentified, or Hoax] Science news: Octopuses came to Earth from space as frozen eggs millions of years ago - Express.co.uk

[octobot]

Noisey​

Scientists believe the octopus could be an alien that arrived on earth from outer space
Herald Sun
It was especially dramatic* for a type of mollusc* called a cephalopod. Tentacles reached out from their shells and wove their way into an enormous variety of creatures, which eventually became the octopus, cuttlefish and squid we know today.
The Darkness Maybe Predicted that News Story About Octopi Being AliensNoisey
Last week in science and tech: Giant sun-eating black holes, alien octopus, and moreQrius
Are octopuses aliens? These experts say they came from outer spaceTimes of India

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[octobot]

iNet​

Eight reasons why the octopus is one of the strangest – and most wonderful – creatures on the planet
iNews
With extraordinary traits such as the ability to change colour in a flash and to squirt ink at foes – not to mention their other-worldly appearance – you could be forgiven for mistaking octopuses as aliens. Which is exactly what happened last week when ...


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[octobot]

NBCNews.com​

Is the octopus an alien?
NBCNews.com
The octopus certainly does look strange, with bugged-out eyes, suction-cup tentacles, and the ability to change color for camouflage. But a new paper in a peer-reviewed scientific journal posits that octopuses aren't just strange: They are ALIENS ...
They Swim Among Us: Are Octopuses Actually Extraterrestrials?Geek
Paper Suggests Octopuses Came From Space: Here's Why Octopuses Are So FascinatingBrinkwire (press release)

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[DWhatley]

MetaZoan #63 Octopuses Did Not Come From Space 5/24/2018

@pgs weighs in on the octopus eggs from space paper

A few months ago a paper appeared online that argued, among other things, that octopuses might have arrived from space several hundred million years ago as frozen eggs, carried by a meteorite. The paper has 33 authors and is in press in a journal called Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. Much of the article is concerned with an older idea that all life on Earth might have been seeded from space, but it is the octopus claim that has been picked up by the media. Several news stories* have also made a connection between this article and my book Other Minds, where I claim that because of their combination of behavioral complexity and evolutionary distance from us, encountering a cephalopod like an octopus is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.

Might octopuses really have come from space? Is this a possibility to take at least somewhat seriously? I don’t think it should be taken seriously at all; it is vanishingly unlikely to be true. ..,

 

[Mark Carnall]

I wrote about this a few weeks ago. On the cephalopod science alone, it's clear they don't know what they're talking about. Full of technical errors, ignorance of nomenclature, cherry picking a few papers, speculation and limited grasp of probability. Total nonsense and full of hubris.

Fortunately from tweets and this blog a few media agencies picked up the nonsense side before it was reported too far and wide as an actual science story.

How this got published...

 

[tonmo]

How this got published...

..."any press is good press" is as strong as ever in the Internet age

 

[Mark Carnall]

Well they even call out one of the manuscript reviewers IN THE PAPER and kind of boast that they won't be referring to any of the usual forms of evidence in this field...

 

[Squirrel1]

Sounds a bit like panspermia, which I think could have happened... but I’m a bit skeptical about if larger, more complex animals would have been able to arrive here. Sounds kind of fake.