Yrurtj

On a distant planet covered mostly by water a species of highly intelligence cephalopods have evolved and even developed space travel. The problem?

Most other species are land dwellers and the cephalopods need a means to traverse their space stations and cities. Without a skeleton of their own their land travel is limited to an undignified and uncomfortable crawl that is entirely unbecoming of the most ingenious species in the galaxy.

The solution? Build their own skeleton. An exoskeleton specifically. Ideally one that can be powered by the cephalopod's own muscle strength.

So my question is; Would it be feasible for a cephalopod to move on land by inhabiting a non-powered exoskeleton and moving the limbs with their tentacles. In my mind it works by the cephalopod entering the tightly fit exoskeleton, which provides the creature support enough to not collapse under gravity, and use their own flesh in place of the muscle tissue normally used to move the skeleton around.

If this combination wouldn't be functional what would be a way to make it functional? Preferably keeping with the non-powered artificial exoskeleton concept.

The problem lies in how and what to build the exoskeleton out of.

Cephalopods are not really as dexterous as humans are; they might use something like chopsticks, made of crab's claws or something similar, for the fine manipulation.

Underwater, no metallurgy is possible, and very little chemistry, since water is so good a solvent.

Once they realise they need the exoskeleton trick, or the necessity of some kind of artificial implements, I think the best route left to our cephalopods might be to breed clams to produce mother-of-pearl and aragonite shapes, and others to dissolve them or weld them together. Then, they can start making exoskeletons out of interlocking, welded mother-of-pearl parts.

I fear it will be a long and frustrating road.

Then, they meet the land-dwelling species and basically breed and enhance them, until they discover fire. And, after long experimentations (cephalopods are fascinated by fire), they discover metals. Tin, copper, bronze, iron.

At this point the exoskeletons will be made of metal struts and mother-of-pearl, and by the time they discover space travel, chances are that they're mostly using battery-powered exoskeletons.

Unless there is some non-technological way of achieving space travel, I'd expect exoskeletons to pre-date space travels by a very large margin.

I don't see why this wouldn't be feasible. The simplest incarnation of some sort of exoskeleton would probably just be a few strong sticks that the cephalopod grasps with its tentacles. It wouldn't be that different from how we use crutches or stilts to lift ourselves. If the cephalopods are anything like what we have on Earth they should have no trouble wrapping their tentacles around a piece of wood or metal and lifting their own body weight without any additional mechanical help. Using four tentacles to grab four walking sticks would still leave an eight-tentacled cephalopod with plenty of appendages for holding and grabbing and manipulating its surroundings.

Yes it would work with three things to consider:

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  Stability The cephalopods will probably have to learn for months how to use the exoskeleton without falling over. For varying steepness and such they will probably need a year or even more.


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  Oxygen They somehow need access to oxygen while on land which probably requires something like water tanks attached around them or something similar.


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  Water The inside of the exoskeleton needs water to keep them nice and wet and prvent drying out.

This species, early in their history, would have to develop an understanding that their advancement is limited by their environment.
By saying the world is mostly covered in oceans, I would assume that there is some dry land somewhere. Around that dry land, a branch of this species would develop a form of amphibious abilities or tactics to crawl on land to develop the technologies to gain an advantage over other species or their own kind. This would be metallurgy and chemistry as others have pointed out that would be difficult (not necessarily impossible) to develop. They may have got an understanding of metallurgy around geothermal vents. needing a safer place to advance this ideas, the land and air would be the solution. The race that either develops the strength to crawl on land or develop a crude tool to assist them, such as an exoskeleton or crutches.
The race that manage to get on shore would become the dominate society and what ever method they used to accomplish this would be further developed and improved on over t