They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
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Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#2I love this video adaptation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#3Past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737993
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#4BBC Radio version: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00yyz3b
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#5[deleted]
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#6This 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 it for fuel? It would be like coming across a power plant that is powered by burning CPUs and motherboards.
They would wonder why we didn’t just use the abundant sunlight and elements to power ourselves (like for example plants).
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#7This 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…
> This feels very shallow and wrong.
What would you expect from meat.
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#8This 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…
“This science fiction would never happen in real life!!” is my favorite kind of comment.
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#9This 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…
The answer is pretty obvious - building this intricately organized matter from scratch out of sunlight and elements is extremely inefficient, much better to recycle the existing bulding blocks of lower levels of organization.
(You don't make software from scratch from sand and electricity, you use an off-the-shelf CPU and existing libraries.)
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#10This 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…
The answer is pretty obvious - building this intricately organized matter from scratch out of sunlight and elements is extremely inefficient, much better to recycle the existing bulding blocks of lower levels of organization. (You don't make software from scratch from sand and electricity, you use an off-the-shelf CPU and existing libraries.)
Most of the meat consumed is not used to build things but is consumed by the body for energy.