8 ms·
They're made out of meat (1991)
- asah 7mo ago[flagged]
- supriyo-biswas 7mo agoI'm sure this account has been compromised (or this was the posters plan all along) and they're posting spam links now.
- dooglius 7mo agoThe link appears to be as described and is not spam
- sl-1 7mo agoRelated: Carl Sagan's Cosmos resampled to make a "Meat Planet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP7K9SycELA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP7K9SycELA
- api 7mo agoGreat short film version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg 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.
- rob74 7mo agoIf 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...
- Tade0 7mo agoDepends how they're listening I think. There was a time not long ago when reportedly looking at the emails being exchanged around the world one would think the most pressing matter, discussed at length, was how to "enlarge your penis".
- FarmerPotato 7mo agoThink if the metazoans had written down their reproductive anxieties.
- lproven 7mo agoWe are metazoans? Well, I can't be sure about you, but I am and all my friends too.
- FarmerPotato 7mo agoRight. I had in mind an article I read about the "ur-metazoan" I propose the concept "Linnaeus-Years" to measure how outdated my taxonomical vocabulary is.
- Izkata 7mo agoI 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_madness_part_one/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/8vbfgk/the_veil_of_mad...
- lproven 7mo agoTBH Vernor Vinge did it a _lot_ better.
- the_af 7mo agoI upvoted because I didn't know the short film existed and it's interesting. I think the short film completely misses the mark if both entities are there in human form, in a diner. (Of course, budget constraints, and the adaptation cannot just be two inorganic beings talking, but still...)
- michaelsmanley 7mo agoBisson once lived in the town just across the river from where I grew up and was an inspiration for me as a nerdy kid from the sticks who just wanted to write science fiction. His novels Talking Man, Fire on the Mountain, Voyage to the Red Planet, and Pirates of the Universe (don't be fooled by those last two titles; he was always undermining old sci-fi tropes) were among my favorites. This story is one of his goofier ones. I wasn't as big a fan of his short stories as they tended towards the jokey style of absurdism, but a favorite of mine is his "Bears Discover Fire."
- fridder 7mo agoThe short film someone made is pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg
- eloisant 7mo agoThe short film makes no sense, as the 2 people talking are meat themselves.
- the_af 7mo agoPlus for the story to make sense, they have to be seeing Earth from scans/sensors, and one of them must in fact not be familiar with Earth at all, having disbelief in what the other is saying. But if they are both there, in a diner, they cannot be as skeptical. I get the constraints of short indie films, I love them regardless, but in this particular case it completely misses the mark.
- stdbrouw 7mo agoYou just have to go along with the idea that skin provides no indication of meatiness and that the two aliens are Ford Prefect types, then the short film lands just fine.
- the_af 7mo agoI guess. It's still hard to mesh with the idea they don't believe these humans flap their meat at each other, or that they do not communicate exclusively via radio signals. It doesn't match my idea that these are two energy/mechanical beings discussing a faraway planet from their spaceship or whatever, talking theory without actually seeing the beings they are discussing.
- ceejayoz 7mo agoYou've never encountered, say, a baffling code bug that couldn't possibly be caused by X, spent a day on it, and found out it turns out to be caused by X?
- tomhow 7mo agoPreviously... They're Made Out of Meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43994603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43994603 - May 2025 (3 comments) They're Made Out of Meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38420111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38420111 - Nov 2023 (168 comments) They're made out of meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31965062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31965062 - July 2022 (151 comments) 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=11561522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561522 - April 2016 (3 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 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8098264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8098264 - July 2014 (1 comment) "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)
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- apostata 7mo ago[flagged]
- epistasis 7mo agoIt's not a reproach, there are no negative words in the comment. It's a gathering of information so that people can get more comments.
- tomhow 7mo agoIt's not a reproach at all! We do this all the time when something has appeared before on HN, so that people can look at older threads if they're interested. It's significant signal that a particular post has appeared repeatedly on HN over the nearly two decades we've existed. It's also interesting to see how the style of discussion about the topic may have changed over time.
- ableal 7mo agoSomehow this story isn't as fun today as it was when first printed ...
- globular-toast 7mo agoWas it ever "fun"? I always found it scary and depressing, in a good way, of course.
- mortenjorck 7mo agoAs I’ve gotten older, it’s become increasingly hard for me to understand how anyone can read such comical reductionism as enlightenment. We are infinitely complex arrangements of systems built upon systems, from the quantum properties of carbon atoms up through the proteins that make the “meat” we are so glibly reduced to, through the complexities and adaptations of mammalian bodies, up to the fearsome order of the human brain and the intricate sprawl of human society and culture. To reduce us to anything less is to deny the awesomeness of the cosmos itself.
- draw_down 7mo ago[dead]
- empath75 7mo agoDo you feel the same about cows and pigs and chickens? One way to read this is your reading. Another way to read it is as an attempt to make you question the concept of meat.
- BearOso 7mo ago> To reduce us to anything less is to deny the awesomeness of the cosmos itself. Teacher: "Photosynthesis makes energy from water, CO2 and light. The mitochondria are the power centers of the cell." Grade-schooler: "How do they work?" Teacher: "Um. Um..." Modern scientist: "Quantum entanglement and tunneling. We don't really understand any of it."
- tantalor 7mo agoI don't know where you get the claims from "anyone" about "enlightenment". This story is obviously satire. Meaning, it is a lie that tells the truth.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- indoordin0saur 7mo ago> 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?
- emp_ 7mo ago> It was incredible man. Mold on a rock that got to think. Ha, it was amazing while it lasted
- probablyworks 7mo agoThis American Life also did a good narration of this in Act 2 of episode 803 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/803 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/803
- HanClinto 7mo agoBad URL, but this YouTube clip works for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5usXhX0zaO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5usXhX0zaO4
- probablyworks 7mo agogood callout - https://www.thisamericanlife.org/803/transcript https://www.thisamericanlife.org/803/transcript
- analog8374 7mo agoSo, Link, it's all very straightforward and scientific if you just think about it carefully for a moment : we're made out of pixels.
- AntiDyatlov 7mo agoWell, actually, probably not. If you say we're made out of meat, you end up with the hard problem of consciousness. I'm imagining a purple cube in this moment. Is the purple cube made out of meat?
- rokkamokka 7mo agoIt's electrical signals... Inside your meat
- AntiDyatlov 7mo agoSo the power grid is having experiences? Computers too?
- otikik 7mo agoOf course not. If you put two stones in the ground, they define a line. It goes through the center of mass of both stones and extends towards both sides through the universe. Now remove the stones. Does the line stop existing? You can still "see it" in your brain. It could be argued that the line has always been there. That the stones were just a marker. A means for an idea to manifest in the physical word. You could put any two other markers at any point on that line and they would represent the same line. The idea that "the cube is made out of meat" is akin to saying that "the line is made out of stone". Ideas always exist, their representation in the physical world don't. Your sense of consciousness is just one of those representations. It is "immortal", just like the line is. In principle it could exist without the physical substrate that is your brain, or in a different substrate. Probably there's a way to encode all of that into a big number. I think this is where the idea of an "immortal soul" comes from. It is however kind of easy to misinterpret it, especially if one is a mesopotamian sheperd who explains the world with gods and religion.
- pixl97 7mo agoWhere does the simulation happen inside a computer. The hard problem of consciousness isn't.
- glenstein 7mo ago
- grumpopotamus 7mo agoAlso by Terry Bisson and one of my favorite stories is Bears Discover Fire 1990 https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fire/ https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fi...
- haritha-j 7mo agoI didn't really get it to be honest. I feel like something went over my head.
- zulux 7mo agoFair 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.
- nickburns 7mo agoThe 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.
- emmelaich 7mo agoSame, I thought the newberries were going to be some sort of intelligence enhancer.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- nagaiaida 7mo ago
- takahitoyoneda 7mo ago[dead]
- mihaic 7mo agoI like this story, but I never liked the wording "made out of meat", as if the word exists in a world without animals. I could have accepted "proteins", but that's not a catchy title.
- whycome 7mo agoMaybe it’s lab grown in a future and not tied to animals in any way. Just for food.
- jvuygbbkuurx 7mo agoI think that is what makes it great, because it makes it sound absurd. If it was just talking about carbon based lifeforms it wouldn't land the same way.
- post-it 7mo agoThey are clearly familiar with meat-based animals: > “That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.” > “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they’re made out of meat.” And indeed sentient species that are partly made of meat: > “Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.” > “Spare me. Okay, maybe they’re only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside.”
- glenstein 7mo agoI get your point but I don't think that those quotes establish familiarity with meat based animals. Familiarity with animals would be something like "yeah, sure, we know about that planet with cows but this is something else entirely!" (Also humans wouldn't be so surprising if they knew about things like cows). Their references are not to creatures that are meat through-and-through but fictional alien races that have a kind of incidental relationship to meat that doesn't establish meat-based cognition as normal the way that animals would.
- FarmerPotato 7mo agoYou have to read the story in the original eshidilii. It just sounds so illogical in English.
- glitchc 7mo agoEarlier I found it awe-inspiring. Nowadays I find it funny because we have yet to even remotely approach the complexity of meat.
- babblingfish 7mo agoIt's amazing how consciousness remains a mystery given all the scientific progress over the last 100 years
- ryeights 7mo agoIs 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
- squigz 7mo agoIt 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.
- GoblinSlayer 7mo agoYou can do it with no provision for molecules too.
- ryeights 7mo agoThat wouldn’t be complete though. I mean that an outside observer could view a simulation of the universe by your model, down to the subatomic particle level, and find no differences with the real world. There is no measurable “consciousness field” as far as we know, so how can our science even begin to approach the topic?
- GoblinSlayer 7mo agoWhat do you mean by "wouldn’t be complete"? If no differences with the real world are found, then the model is complete.
- ohnoNotAgain321 7mo agosee also Stanisław Lem
- nasretdinov 7mo agoBy all accounts the CPUs we've made with ridiculous stuff like 2nm transistors is _surely_ more advanced than neurons, right? We just haven't figured out how to wire them properly :)
- theowaway 7mo agothey are not
- indoordin0saur 7mo agoThe 2nm claim is all marketing. The smallest features on these gates is much larger. For example, the gate pitch (what this measure used to refer to) on the 2nm process is actually 45 nanometers.
- Theodores 7mo agoNature's machines, for example, for reproducing DNA or for photosynthesis, are in a totally different league of 'precision engineering' to anything that our brightest engineers have ever created. At times we get all giddy because we have invented a quartz clock, a wheel, a straight line or a calculator that seems to be better than anything in the world of nature, however, we sometimes have to overlook nature or forget to question why nature didn't evolve such things. With the clock, every cell in our body has some 'timing circuitry' tied into day/night cycles, seasons and much else. We just insist on doing it our way and proclaiming it better.
- psd1 7mo agoCounterpoint: biology looks like vibe-coding. I would hate to have nature as a colleague, she's an arrogant fool with a mail-order degree. I'd rather maintain a Jeep than a knee.
- outworlder 7mo agoNeurons are insanely more complex, even if you disregard their electrical signaling entirely.
- Finnucane 7mo agoI still remember seeing Terry do a reading of this at Lunacon, I think, shortly after it was published. It was a good reading, he really knew how to land a joke.
- khelavastr 7mo agoIs including an iFrame to Terry Bison's website reprinting?
- DamnInteresting 7mo agoI love this short story, it's one whose memory visits me unbidden from time to time. I blogged about it over 20 years ago[1], and it was already around 15 years old at that time. OMNI magazine was great. [1] https://www.damninteresting.com/retired/short-fiction-made-of-meat/ https://www.damninteresting.com/retired/short-fiction-made-o...
- indoordin0saur 7mo agoI think this story is tacky and doesn't really make sense. Do they already know what meat is? And if so, why do they act surprised when they find that lifeforms are "made" of it? Why even do they have an opinion on "meat"? I find it good for a chuckle perhaps but there's nothing profound in here.
- mpalmer 7mo agoThis does what the best speculative fiction does, attempts to stretch and expand your understanding of the real world by presenting a provocative fictional reality. The author is trying to get you to speculate on the kind of intelligence that would say this about humans.
- jhbadger 7mo agoIt has something to say if you compare it to the traditional arguments against the possibility of AI like Searle's terrible "Chinese Room" analogy - the point is arguing that computers can't possibly think because they are "just machines following programming" is a lot like these mechanical aliens believing that the idea of thinking meat is absurd.
- indoordin0saur 7mo agoI think you completely missed the point about the Chinese Room. The assertion wasn't that machines can't think or compute, but that they don't necessarily have any experience of the thing they are computing. We still have not the faintest idea where consciousness comes from and the Chinese Room thought experiment I think demonstrates this.
- Aperocky 7mo agoThis is fun to read but any such galactic intelligence would probably recognize that its predecessor were meat, probably kept the original meat safe in a corner of the galaxy too.. The universe were quite uniform in character. Galaxies, stars, they are very predictable and essentially the same everywhere, across billions of years (both time and distance), can't see why that doesn't apply to life too in a general sense. Maybe different RNA building blocks and genetic chemistry, but probably work out similar to meat and organic stuff.
- justonceokay 7mo agoIt’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!?
- jounker 7mo agoYou seem to be lacking in imagination.
- zamadatix 7mo agoI think they are abound in sarcasm :).
- psd1 7mo agoI can relate. However. The unspoken rider is "...according to our current understanding". I don't think you have the footing to constrain the future to only what we understand today, especially since we can't reconcile our two most fundamental theories. I don't think you can do that even if you could explain quantum entanglement in terms of relativity. On a separate note, science fiction isn't generally about science, imo, it's about human politics (Greg Egan being an outlier). The cod-science gives colour and setting. If you read it as stories about humanity, maybe the charlatanry won't irk you so much. I find this mindset helps me deal with my own irascibility.
- prvc 7mo agoThe concept of "meat" presupposes the existence of carnivores, so it's hard to see how the realization in the story could ever have been surprising.
- hermitcrab 7mo ago"We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.” Somebody recently recounted that they had been a convention of people who been 'abducted' by aliens. They commented that "Aliens certainly have a type".
- stared 7mo agoDiscarding 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.pdf http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/supercommunity/article_1087.p... for this "not looking at". For this "beyond comprehension", think about Solaris Ocean, a mind (or non-mind?) we cannot relate to anything else. Or WAU from SOMA.
- the_af 7mo ago> See "The great silence" by Ted Chiang I found this short story very moving. Of course, it's designed on purpose for this. But Chiang is usually so cerebral it caught me by surprise.
- srean 7mo agoIt is a very moving story. I can't help posting it as a comment when parrot and bird intelligence gets discussed on HN.
- Frotag 7mo ago"The Baby-Eating Aliens" also explores hypothetical differences in alien culture. It's also written in the same absurd conversational style. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469761
- ku1ik 7mo agoI made this ASCII visualization for the radio play of “They’re Made Out of Meat”: https://asciinema.org/a/746358 https://asciinema.org/a/746358
- oersted 7mo agoIf 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.
- dwheeler 7mo agoI suggest this vocal performance: https://youtube.com/watch?v=GggK9SjJpuQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=GggK9SjJpuQ
- ItMayWorkTryIt 7mo agoBrandon Sanderson (very prolific fantasy author) has a novella inspired by this: * Original: https://www.brandonsanderson.com/blogs/blog/i-hate-dragons https://www.brandonsanderson.com/blogs/blog/i-hate-dragons * Extended: https://www.brandonsanderson.com/blogs/blog/i-hate-dragons-extended-version https://www.brandonsanderson.com/blogs/blog/i-hate-dragons-e...
- antitoxic 7mo agoThis reminds me of a different short story I read somewhere that I, for the life of me, cannot find anymore. It's about aliens discussing earth (but they call it differently I believe) and how far they have evolved. They have 2 books/logs. One containing all life, and then another book containing all super intelligent life. They find out that earth already has some super advanced stuff, so they are deciding if it should move to the second log. Does this ring a bell for anyone?
- pedrosorio 7mo agoSilly Asses by Isaac Asimov? https://www.contecurte.eu/2019/05/ecumene-silly-asses/ https://www.contecurte.eu/2019/05/ecumene-silly-asses/
- antitoxic 7mo agoYes I think so, although I might have read a slight adaptation. Thank you!
- rbanffy 7mo agoJust wait a generation or two.
- FartyMcFarter 7mo agoNot really a story but I feel this sort of belongs here: https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1992/CyberPigs.html https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles...
- timonoko 7mo agoWhy is "They Were Made Out Of Meat" Hacker News favourite, but "Bordered in Black" is always flagged? Gemini: In short, "They're Made Out of Meat" makes people feel smart and curious, while "Bordered in Black" makes people feel uncomfortable and argumentative—and on Hacker News, "uncomfortable and argumentative" is a fast track to being flagged.
- timonoko 7mo ago[dead]
- zamadatix 7mo agoAsking Gemini with the titles swapped will give you an equally confident story and reasoning about why "Bordered in Black" is actually preferred. This, and more, is why we're interested in what you have to say about the stories instead of what the LLM has to say. What makes you a big fan of the story/reminded you of it here? I just gave it a re-read and thought it was alright. Not my favorite work of his... but certainly not bad either. Perhaps I've just read too many Sci-Fi stories to be properly shocked by the theme given the relatively short time to be immersed in the setting :).
- dooglius 7mo agoDo you have an example of it being flagged? I only see one old post from 7 years ago (not flagged), and that links to a scribd pdf rather than the author's website