The short film someone made is pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg
It's a good visualization but they skipped the punchline, which was the entire purpose of the story.
They're made out of meat (1991)
101–110 of 191 posts
Re: They're made out of meat (1991)
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!?
You seem to be lacking in imagination.
I think they are abound in sarcasm :).
Re: They're made out of meat (1991)
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't really get it to be honest. I feel like something went over my head.
Fair enough.. It's not really sci-fi. Just a quiet slice of life with a twist. If I may be so bold, this story would have sucked when I was younger, but now that I've been acquainted with the ages of all the characters, it makes sense.
The big bear tended the fire, breaking up the dry branches by holding one end and stepping on them, like people do. He was good at keeping it going at the same level. Another bear poked the fire from time to time but the others left it alone. It looked like only a few of the bears knew how to use fire and were carrying the others along. But isn’t that how it is with everything? Every once in a while, a smaller bear walked into the circle of firelight with an armload of wood and dropped it onto the pile. Median wood has a silvery cast, like driftwood.Re: They're made out of meat (1991)
#104I made this ASCII visualization for the radio play of “They’re Made Out of Meat”: https://asciinema.org/a/746358
Re: They're made out of meat (1991)
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
The short film makes no sense, as the 2 people talking are meat themselves.
"probed them all the way through. They're completely meat." The two talking, and other races, are machines that cover themselves however they like. These two are machines with artificial skins. That is normal. Fully meat beings are not. At least that is how I always read this story.
Machines with artificial skins? I'll have to re-read the story, I thought the "meat" was matter and the aliens were made of energy.
Re: They're made out of meat (1991)
#106If you liked this check out 365tomorrows.com, they one such scifi story for each day of the year on rotation, quite similar in style, wit and length.
It’s a great daily snack, the constraints of Flash Fiction yield quite lean and punchy stuff.
Re: They're made out of meat (1991)
#107Discarding 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…
"The Baby-Eating Aliens" also explores hypothetical differences in alien culture. It's also written in the same absurd conversational style.
Re: They're made out of meat (1991)
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's amazing how consciousness remains a mystery given all the scientific progress over the last 100 years
Is it surprising? It seems likely you could build a complete working model of the universe with no provision for consciousness at all. As far as modern science goes, it's an intractable problem
It doesn't seem likely to me that in, just a couple hundred years, humans have developed such a thorough understand of every natural process as all that.
Re: They're made out of meat (1991)
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
> What is it satirizing? 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 anythi…
I thought it was satirising faux-intellectual SF short stories that try to seem deeper than they are. If it’s just an actual faux-intellectual SF short story, that’s much less interesting.
On this planet, we’ve found that basically anything can be used to perform computation, electronics (semiconductors, vacuum tubes), mechanics (linkages, gears, cams, steel balls) , pneumatics, photonics, electromechanics, electrochemistry, optoelectronics, chemistry, phonons, hydraulics, even collectible card games. Donald Trump has said many dumb things, but he was right when he said “everything is computer”.
And almost anything has been used to transfer information. Light (fire, smoke, electricity, heated wires, coloured flags, mirrors, lasers, bioluminescence, LEDs, discharge tubes, electric arcs), sound (vibrating strings, membranes, tubes of air in hundreds of configurations, explosives, blunt objects), chemistry, electricity, electromagnetic radiation, waving body parts around, burning pieces of dead tree to make coloured marks on squished pieces of dead tree, magnetism, scratching into rocks, circles of aluminium with tiny holes in them embedded in plastic, transistors, circles of vinyl with wavy grooves cut in them, pieces of paper with tiny holes punched in them, rockets, flares.
So the notion that any advanced spacefaring civilisation would be astonished by any form of creature or communication method given how much variety there is on this one planet is hard to entertain, even as satire.
Re: They're made out of meat (1991)
#110Great short film version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg I do wonder sometimes if someone out there is waiting for something actually intelligent to emerge down here.
If they exist, they're probably currently placing bets whether we will manage to destroy ourselves (or at least set our civilization back by centuries) with our nuclear weapons, our climate change or our social media...
I like the idea we live inside the Veil of Madness (A sort of galactic bermuda triangle that drives inhabitants insane, so all spacefaring civilizations stay away).
https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/8vbfgk/the_veil_of_mad...