Mr. 8

"When we finally would cooperate, we might create a wonder: a ninth arm of the octopus"

— Dirk Rossmann, Climate Activist

Because oceans are warming up faster than land, Mr. 8, the Giant Pacific Octopus and old star inhabitant of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, has become the "face" for the defense and rescue of the lesser deplored sea animals suffering and getting extinct due to climate change.

Mr. 8 has become THE well-known, media-covered symbol for the dying ocean. And the ocean is the origin of life from which we originally came. The ocean influences our weather and the oxygen we breathe. And the ocean is dying.

And so Mr. 8 has become the deplored ambassador for all those creatures whose threatened extinction reminds us, the human species, of our own inevitable dark fate and threatening annihilation should we not be able to finally stop the current craziness of fighting each other over remaining resources, rather than finally finding a common ground to cooperate with good faith for the survival of us all.

With eight 4 meters-wide tentacles, his 60 cm head, and plate-sized eyes, Mr. 8 humbles everyone in his presence, and the compassion with this human-like, curious, intelligent, friendly, and playful super-personality feels absolutely real.

This creature has more than half a billion years of evolution on an entirely different path than that of our own, with neurons distributed throughout their suckers, arms, and brain rather than centralized like our own brain. Octopi have even three hearts, blue blood, a venomous beak, and no bones, and therefore can squeeze themselves into all kinds of shapes and spaces. They can willingly change the color as well as the texture of their skin into a myriad of dazzling colors and patterns.

And all this together, evolution has evolved this species unlike all others and made them way more adaptable to change than any other larger animal, including us. But nevertheless, Mr. 8 and his species, despite the evolutionary advantages that let them survive millions of years, find themselves today at the top of the list of always gone, never come back, highly endangered forms of life.

Mr. 8's presence is repeating the lesson that even the masterpiece of evolution cannot evolve faster than our current environment is currently changing. And this, my friend, should really remind us that we, the human species, must not "progress" at the current speed either. And therefore the only feasible solution out of this life-threatening mess is to finally stop the speed of change, or the change at all, or even reset our socio-tech culture to where we once felt ok with it and where we have been still in control in a way that we were still able to adapt to such implied new requirements, consequences, and limitations.

The octopus has survived because his arms are working together over a distributed, non-centralized brain that is close to where life is felt and life does play. And THIS should become our role model for a more decentralized and cooperative humanity that can sense, think, decide, and execute better at the edges where real individual stuff is happening in real-time and where consequences can be felt immediately.