91–100 of 191 posts
Previously... They're Made Out of Meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43994603 - May 2025 (3 comments) They're Made Out of Meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38420111 - Nov 2023 (168 comments) They're made out of meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31965062 - July 2022 (151 comments) They're Made Out of Meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737993 - Oct 202…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know where you get the claims from "anyone" about "enlightenment". This story is obviously satire. Meaning, it is a lie that tells the truth.
> This story is obviously satire. Is it though? What is it satirizing? Is it satirizing the idea of water and carbon based life? How does that tell any truth?
I think it's (partly) satirizing how we feel about ourselves as the apex beings, and as explorers of the cosmos and colonizers. What if we are actually quite subpar, and the actual apex beings in the universe find us so unlikely and disgusting that they prefer to pretend they are not there, thus giving an answer to Fermi's Paradox? They don't want to conquer us, they don't want to have anything to do with us!
But of course, it's also satirizing this alien-as-a-bug idea, so common of early scifi, that the alien is a disgusting mess of antennae or simly appendages. What if we were disgusting to enlightened aliens?
What we can absolutely be sure of is that Bisson wasn't making fun of meat or the human brain, the thought that apparently irked the topmost commenter.
See "The great silence" by Ted Chiang, http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/supercommunity/article_1087.p... for this "not looking at".
For this "beyond comprehension", think about Solaris Ocean, a mind (or non-mind?) we cannot relate to anything else. Or WAU from SOMA.
Discarding scientific evidence usually looks differently than "we discussed that we didn’t liked it". Is is usually not looking at all, never starting a discussion, or even lacking an intellectual framework to comprehend the phenomenon. See "The great silence" by Ted Chiang, http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/supercommunity/article_1087.p... for this "not looking at". For this "beyond comprehension", think about Solaris…
I found this short story very moving. Of course, it's designed on purpose for this. But Chiang is usually so cerebral it caught me by surprise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They only look like meat to blend in. It's the only way to figure out if they're made out of meat.
In the story, the very idea of permanently meat-based beings appals them, and in fact one of them doesn't entirely believe it. So why would they look like meat to "blend in", a priori, if one of them doesn't even fathom the idea? "Blend in" with what? One of them doesn't believe what it's dealing with! Like a sibling comment mentions, they talk about "meat sounds"... using meat sounds! Why would they find it surprisi…
I'd imagine British spies in WWII sometimes wore swastikas to blend in?
They infiltrating to investigate. It needn't be an endorsement of the practice.
I think this story is tacky and doesn't really make sense. Do they already know what meat is? And if so, why do they act surprised when they find that lifeforms are "made" of it? Why even do they have an opinion on "meat"? I find it good for a chuckle perhaps but there's nothing profound in here.
Yes, they do:
> "“Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”"
What they cannot fathom is a sentient lifeform that achieves things but lives their entire lives as meat-based things, flapping their meat mouth parts to make disgusting meat sounds at each other. And I think they really never thought much about human reproduction!
This is fun to read but any such galactic intelligence would probably recognize that its predecessor were meat, probably kept the original meat safe in a corner of the galaxy too.. The universe were quite uniform in character. Galaxies, stars, they are very predictable and essentially the same everywhere, across billions of years (both time and distance), can't see why that doesn't apply to life too in a general sens…
This is fun to read but any such galactic intelligence would probably recognize that its predecessor were meat, probably kept the original meat safe in a corner of the galaxy too.. The universe were quite uniform in character. Galaxies, stars, they are very predictable and essentially the same everywhere, across billions of years (both time and distance), can't see why that doesn't apply to life too in a general sens…
It’s called fiction for a reason. Glad you’ve risen above that nonsense! I personally hate that it implies there are faster ways to travel than light speed. We know this to be a hard limit in the physics of our universe and it rubs me the wrong way when SF writers just glaze over reality. Not to mention hydrogen life forms, what’s that about!?
This American Life also did a good narration of this in Act 2 of episode 803 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/803
Bad URL, but this YouTube clip works for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5usXhX0zaO4
By all accounts the CPUs we've made with ridiculous stuff like 2nm transistors is _surely_ more advanced than neurons, right? We just haven't figured out how to wire them properly :)
At times we get all giddy because we have invented a quartz clock, a wheel, a straight line or a calculator that seems to be better than anything in the world of nature, however, we sometimes have to overlook nature or forget to question why nature didn't evolve such things. With the clock, every cell in our body has some 'timing circuitry' tied into day/night cycles, seasons and much else. We just insist on doing it our way and proclaiming it better.