User blog comment:Mr.Robbo/Human Chauvinism 5/@comment-4364108-20140106235932/@comment-4844180-20140107012914

1: You don't need a brain to have bodily control, or at least in the sense that there is /one main area/ which controls your body and thoughts. Many insect species have several smaller clumps of nerve cells that control them instead of one specific area.

2: You could have a substitute for nerve cells, simply passing on information and keeping it is good enough. It doesn't matter on the speed either as even between species on Earth nervous systems are at different speeds. A sapient plant species could just think at a much slower rate, akin to their movement rate would make most sense to me.

3: The definition of plants by taxonomy (shortened). "Plant, any member of the kingdom Plantae, multicellular eukaryotic life forms characterised by:

A) Photosynthetic Nutrition in which chemical energy is produced from water, minerals and CO2 with the aid of pigments and the sun's radiation. (exceptions in the form of parasitic plants and underground orchids)

B) Essentially unlimited growth in localised regions.

C) Cells containing cellulose to make shape to some extent rigid.

D) The absence of organs of locomotion.

E) The absence of a nervous system.

F) Life histories that show an alteration of haploid and diploid generations, with the dominance of one over the other being taxonomically significant."

So technically any exo-planet plants in relation to Sol is not a plant. I know taxonomy is based on evolution and species being made from others by trial and error, but I'm just using the definition for plants.

I don't see a problem with sapience by that definition, as we could have a substitute for a "nervous system" to think with other variations of cells and connections, the definition of nervous system is that it is made up of nerve cells, fibre and carries impulses around.

I don't think it would be impossible for space travel either, they could manipulate materials extremely slowly and, as the zambarau page notes, make computers which are faster than them and can do things for them. Or perhaps they could have a giant plant going out of the atmosphere, as on Atavin described here, and have seeds floating out into space. These two things are scientifically accurate and have had their research done.

As for the aquatic side of this, many animals can use tools already. Many aquatic animals can manipulate their environment, with their mouths or tentacles or even using techniques to move the water around objects to move them.

Electricity wouldn't be impossible to develop as there could just be a protective layer on the "wires" or anything they need to have when developing things and the materials could be accessed underwater. You don't need electricity though to become spacefaring either as they could just make things with different pressures between the top and bottom of the structure so much that it works like a balloon to get through into the atmosphere.

There are many different ways in which plants and aquatic life could become sapient and spacefaring.