These aliens obviously haven't visited the Meat Planet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP7K9SycELA
They're Made out of Meat
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Re: They're Made out of Meat
#42Versus what - molecules of minerals that randomly fuse together in a way that just happens to form an integrated circuit, memory and OS ?
The thing about organic life is that it goes though millions of trials and errors before something survives long enough to have memory and inheritance.
Re: They're Made out of Meat
#43I first heard this performed on a podcast called, "The Truth: Movies for Your Ears." Very good podcast for dramatic stories, sometimes artsy like this one.
Re: They're Made out of Meat
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind they'd probably not be using English either.
That´s the point, we have to assume that "meat" is the English word that in their culture would be the best translation for the concept of "Biological, carbon-based lifeform".
They mention they know some other lifeforms "made of meat" where the brain is made of something different, so, they may be familiar with the concept of meat while considering intelligent meat an extremely odd idea.
Re: They're Made out of Meat
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you have illustrated the point of the story by assuming these alien beings would react exactly how human's would. We don't know anything but human nature but it's not hard to imagine that non-human's or, rather, non-meat wouldn't have a non-human, non-meat nature.
the problem I had with the story is, exactly what type of existence do these aliens have? Why would they refer to other races as meat if they were not similar, biological lifeforms? Meat is a term used to denote food, not a life form type.
The idea I had, before the end of the story, was that the aliens were electronic (robots with AI).
Perhaps their far back robot ancestors made by an ancient "meat" civilization, but them having forgotten all of that after millions of years...
>Meat is a term used to denote food, not a life form type.
Actually meat just means meat. It's not just a word for a food, it's a specific kind of organic "substance".
Re: They're Made out of Meat
#46At this level of evolution for the aliens it would be obivous that intelligence can come in different forms but the basic process is the same and mostly irrelevant.
Re: They're Made out of Meat
#47One of my favorite stories ever. That, and The Last Question.
Ooh, thanks for the tip - that was really good. http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
Re: They're Made out of Meat
#48I don't know what all the fuss is about. I'm a Turing test.
Sorry, but I'm still not letting you out of the box.
Re: They're Made out of Meat
#49At this level of evolution for the aliens it would be obivous that intelligence can come in different forms but the basic process is the same and mostly irrelevant.
The point is to satirize intelligent lifeforms less than 9 light-minutes from Sol, who think "alien" and immediately think "A bipedal humanoid with colorful skin and Buddhist-by-way-of-Native-American spiritual practices."
Re: They're Made out of Meat
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a very interesting concept that indicates that the limit of speed is not light, but the space itself. Space itself is such that it cannot let anything travel faster than light. It's like check points in space which slows down light to it's speed we call C. May be somewhere in the universe, or within the black hole, space is malleable enough to allow faster than light travel. It's just a concept, but a very i…
Wanna know the real reason? C is just the maximum floating point value of the computer that our universe's simulation is running on. Similarly, the Planck length is the value closest to zero.
That would perhaps be even more interesting!