My favourite short story is Last Contact, by Steven Baxter[1]. It always scared the hell out of me, because it was so... mundane, to the very end.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080725045740/http://www.solari...
They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
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Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
“This science fiction would never happen in real life!!” is my favorite kind of comment.
It is a personality trait I identify with, made more stark because my wife is quite the opposite. IMHO, good fiction asks us to suspend our disbelief to create a novel setting and unique circumstances. Having accepted that, we still expect the world to behave according to its own logic. Bad fiction abuses the suspension of disbelief, and it rubs people like me (and the gp) wrong. In this case, it is a silly short sto…
As a (former?) physicist, I very much prefer to try to imagine what would need to be changed in our rules so the presented world would be possible, rather than "ok I accept this little change but everything else has to work as close as possible to our own universe"
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#33I love it, reminds me a lot of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#34This feels very shallow and wrong. Surely an super intelligent alien species that studied “meat” would know the depth of the organization starting with the organic molecules and extending to the cell and then to the neurons and neural networks and then the brain. The surprising thing to them would not be that we are made of meat but that we eat meat. How could we take such intricately organized matter and just burn i…
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Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#35Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#36I enjoyed thoroughly this short exploring concepts of time perception between host and child simulated reality entities: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien...
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#37This feels very shallow and wrong. Surely an super intelligent alien species that studied “meat” would know the depth of the organization starting with the organic molecules and extending to the cell and then to the neurons and neural networks and then the brain. The surprising thing to them would not be that we are made of meat but that we eat meat. How could we take such intricately organized matter and just burn i…
You think an advanced species would be surprised that we're made of what we consume? Quite a funny take, because there's literally no other option. The reason a power plant, or factory, or any machine at all doesn't "eat" what it's made of is because human engineers are the digestion enzymes and protein factories. We digest raw materials (amino acids) into parts (proteins) based on plans and schematics (DNA), and the…
> Those three don't belong together in any way. Yet here we are.
The difference here is degree of humanization of an animal. Recent Andrew Huberman podcast with a former FBI hostage negotiator[1] touched upon the topic.
In animal research labs, the researchers are disallowed to name the animal subjects, only to assign numbers or codes.
In a hostage situation, simply letting your captor know your name increases the chances of your survival. Conversely, having your face covered reduces the chances.
Humanization and dehumanization of things, living beings, other humans and ourselves is something that we generally tend to do. A lot of cruelty in the world can be traced to this observation.
1. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGh...
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#38Andy Weir's The Egg is another excellent short story: [1] http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html If you're looking for more short stories, I highly recommend the following: • Ted Chiang's Exhalation • Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life and Others • Ken Liu's Paper Menagerie • Borges's Ficciones • Smullyan's What is the Name of This Book? • Smullyan's Lady or the Tiger? • Douglas Adams's God's Debris Remember t…
God's Debris is by Scott Adams, not Douglas.
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#39This has been turned into a truly hilarious song with only a few changes. https://youtu.be/6NW67-Mu2wU
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#40Andy Weir's The Egg is another excellent short story: [1] http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html If you're looking for more short stories, I highly recommend the following: • Ted Chiang's Exhalation • Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life and Others • Ken Liu's Paper Menagerie • Borges's Ficciones • Smullyan's What is the Name of This Book? • Smullyan's Lady or the Tiger? • Douglas Adams's God's Debris Remember t…
Ted Chiang is a genius, and pretty much everything he writes is magnificent. "Exhalation" is ridiculously good. "Understand" is probably my favorite.