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They're made out of meat (1991)
- fmakunbound 4y agoMy favorite film adaptation of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ
- onionisafruit 4y agoIt’s very different but reminds me of the line “literally made of chicken” from Mitchell and Webb. https://youtu.be/_pDTiFkXgEE https://youtu.be/_pDTiFkXgEE
- KennyBlanken 4y agoPlease link to the one posted by the director, not some slimeball stealing his work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg
- jakzurr 4y agoIt's great. Author is still living... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Bisson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Bisson Many times on HN; I'm good with that. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Terry+Bisson https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Terry+Bisson
- Mogzol 4y agoThe short film by Stephen O'Regan based on this is pretty good if you haven't seen it: https://youtu.be/T6JFTmQCFHg https://youtu.be/T6JFTmQCFHg
- postalrat 4y agoAnother good short story: https://www.nature.com/articles/519498a https://www.nature.com/articles/519498a
- jonah-archive 4y agoAnother of Terry Bisson's short stories, "Bears Discover Fire", is an absolute gem, and free to read online: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fire/ https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fi...
- retrocryptid 4y ago+1. Bears Discover Fire is awesome.
- CobrastanJorji 4y agoI love the mood of the whole thing, but I wonder if I am missing an obvious symbolism or statement or idea somewhere. Maybe it's just the memories of high school English, but I keep wondering stuff like "do the berries mean something?" or "are the bears supposed to be replacing us?" Are the bears there just to add a bit of surrealism or magical realism, or what?
- jakzurr 4y agoMaybe that's part of the story, heh. Some of the characters wonder if they are missing something.
- mcv 4y agoI sounds to me like a proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox.
- qbrass 4y agoPretty sure the author is hinting that the berries are being cultivated by the bears, but doesn't want to say it. The bears are filling in the gap left behind as humanity advances towards the future. Living in the medians both literally and figuratively. They're not replacing us, but what we were.
- nine_k 4y agoI remember there was an animation series about "Gummi bears" which definitely cultivated "gummi berries" (with magical properties that made the bears act gummi). I wonder if there's a connection / reference.
- can16358p 4y agoI love how they've said "constrained to C space". Many people say speed of light is the absolute speed limit of anything or information can travel. Sure it is, which is easily proven by physics. But the physics we know of applies to what we know. There might be something completely different to what we're seeing/observing/theoritising with our smartest people and best equipment. I'm not saying we can just go faster than C by advancing technology: I know it's limited by relativity and is not a matter of advancing tech. What I'm saying is that there will probably be advancements in physics and technology so that C limit will of course stay the same, but it will be the physics inside the box whereas a complete new understanding of reality outside the box would be discovered, where things can travel "faster" than C using other dimensions or something that we even haven't thought of yet "outside the box", while still being perfectly compatible with the "regular" "inside the box" physics we love and use today, without violating and relativity rules of our classical physics. Then they'll probably look back and just laugh at the people who thought C was the absolute limit to everything.
- cpill 4y agohey, but we'd have to escape the meat first
- firecall 4y agoI've always thought something like this! When people talk about Aliens, and how long it would take them to get here, I think they miss the point! Travelling around the Universe would take forever even at the speed of light. So for Aliens to visit us they most probably have a way to travel unconstrained by what we know as 3D space and time. I am not physicist, I have no idea LOL
- bluGill 4y agoUnless those aliens are close. There are a few stars within 5 light years, it seems reasonable that a sufficiently advanced civilization could reach us from that close in a reasonable amount of time. if they are really long lived 100 light years seems like the outside edge of reasonable travel distance.
- tunnuz 4y agoSuch a good short read. Thanks for sharing.
- wheels 4y agoThe previous 19 discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22they%27re%20made%20out%20of%20meat%22&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- netik 4y agowhy has no one posted the video https://youtu.be/7tScAyNaRdQ https://youtu.be/7tScAyNaRdQ
- gpvos 4y agoTwo others did before you
- KennyBlanken 4y agoAnd, hilariously, the guy didn't even link to the original but someone's re-upload.
- zvmaz 4y agoAn excellent book that greatly expands on this "mystery" is The Mysterious Flame, Conscious Minds in a Material World, Colin McGinn.
- ferongr 4y agoI never liked the story. The premise that a sentient lifeform would be able to traverse the universe, make contact with wildly different lifeforms, but somehow scoff at the idea of "meat lifeforms" is inconceivable, even stretching my suspension of disbelief to its limits. Especially since the explorers in the story have managed to decipher our communications, our culture (mentioning that we sing) and probed our biology.
- rendall 4y agoI find it funny specifically for that reason.
- zvmaz 4y agoFor me, the story highlights the truly astounding and utterly mysterious fact that consciousness emerges from "material meat" (the brain). How is it possible? Granted, their consciousness is also mysterious, but they are blind to that fact, just as we are to some extent. It's all about the Mind-Body problem. Edit: Typos.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- doctor_eval 4y agoI took the timing of the posting to be a reference to the controversy about LaMDA.
- Trasmatta 4y agoI think you missed the fact that the story is meant to be humorous.
- rvba 4y agoIt is a nice story because they didnt choose the more likely option to kill us. I guess in real life (and probably many stories) they would rather attack.
- bhaak 4y agoYou underestimate how far racists are able to go. I always interpreted that story as the discussion between two public officials that are withholding a sensational curiosity or even the scientific discovery of this galactic cycle from the galactic public. Just because of their own prejudices even though they are supposed to welcome any kind of sentience into the galactic community. "Meat" in this story seems to be some kind of slur to me. Why aren't they using a more generic and neutral term like "organic" instead? I wonder if those two have evolved from organic lifeforms which are for whatever reasons remembered badly in the civilization those two protagonists are from.
- dsjfladjsfkl 4y ago
- dang 4y agoRelated: They're Made Out of Meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737993 - Oct 2020 (292 comments) They're Made Out of Meat [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436550 - June 2020 (4 comments) They're made out of meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8910420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8910420 - Jan 2015 (1 comment) They're Made out of Meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152131 - Aug 2014 (170 comments) "They're Made out of Meat?" Short first contact sci-fi story - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3549320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3549320 - Feb 2012 (62 comments) They're made out of Meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774139 - Aug 2009 (3 comments)
- prvc 4y agoWhy would incorporeal beings even have a concept of "meat"?
- hcks 4y agoThis story is cool but it’s premise always bugged me. “meat” as a concept emerges from our own experience. From an alien point of view, “meat” would appear first as some kind of programmable nanotechnology matter, which is far from the trivialness we express when we talk about “meat”
- dopidopHN 4y agoMaybe as opposed to carbon life form ?
- ncmncm 4y agoWhat is weird is that they know what meat is, and don't like it. Like they have meat pests they can't get rid of, or depend on in some unpleasant way they would rather not think about.
- Sharlin 4y agoThe story at its essence pokes fun at philosophers who claim that in silico artificial intelligence is impossible because only meat can think.
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- bannedbybros 4y ago
- nix23 4y agoThere is also no technical error's they are all meat-based.
- dwheeler 4y agoRadio show: https://youtu.be/GggK9SjJpuQ https://youtu.be/GggK9SjJpuQ
- bawana 4y ago@tux3 human brains are constipated. Our current interpretation of data like that from Hubble is that space is expanding. But it could equally be that matter is contracting. Space is the absence of matter. You cannot increase space anymore than you can add ‘cold’to a glass of water. By assuming that light is invariant, we would observe decreasing light frequencies as we measure older light.because We and our rulers have ‘shrunk’. This interpretation also eliminates the need for inventing dark matter and dark energy to explain our observations
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- w0mbat 4y agoThis story never made any sense. If you know what meat is, you are also familiar with large animals with some degree of intelligence. Can’t have one without the other.
- abrax3141 4y agoSince we're talking SciFi, one of the most interesting treatments of space-time is Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep", in which there are different zone of the galaxy that have different space-time characteristics. I find this more interesting than the usual "faster-than-light drive" or "wormhole" sorts of SciFi. (Us engineers are clearly stupid; we actually need to make real things work. SciFi writers just write a high level description, assume that its works as designed, and start the next chapter! :-)