Is it me, or is there a subliminal message in the banner of LightSpeed magazine? No time to look into it, but there appears to be a changing message that flashes on and off to take the place of the "LIGHTSPEED" graphic in the banner. The only one I caught was "RESIST".
I loved this story when I first read it. I made me feel wistful, like a world was dying and simultaneously being born. I can't explain it, but the idea of bears using fire has stayed with me ever since.
Ok - bear mode activated: I'll add 'The Star Bear' by Michael Swanwick, where a man's series of encounters with a bear in Paris echo his feelings about being a Russian emigre.
Fair 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.
The 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.
They only look like they're made of meat. And they only look like they're made of meat to you because you know you're made of meat, and they look like you.
To them, they're just disguised as "what the creatures on this planet look like," which is obviously (to them) not meat, because they've never seen meat beings. To them, we are obviously not-meat, although how we appear is compatible with being meat. But silicone dyed the correct shade can look like meat. Stone painted the right color can look like meat.
And if you say that silicone and stone don't look like meat even when prepared to copy it, bear in mind that we are made of meat and very good at distinguishing it. Different races favor different attributes for distinguishing one person from another, hence why "they all look alike" is somewhat true for pretty much any "them" you care to name. Rocky from Project Hail Mary almost certainly thinks all humans look alike.
"probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
The two talking, and other races, are machines that cover themselves however they like. These two are machines with artificial skins. That is normal. Fully meat beings are not. At least that is how I always read this story.
* This is a virtual environment and the "meat actors" are depicting avatars of virtual/not-meat entities inhabiting that world. That's why there's inconsistencies with real life, for example the red guy's clothes. This was what I thought when I first saw this short.
* This was really an exchange of concepts and data in a language not really suitable for humans to understand. So what you are seeing is not what actually took place, but a translation. Some machine took the abstract data interchange and translated it to what it thought would be more appropriate for a meat head to understand, including setting it up in an environment that would make sense to a human. But it made some mistakes (the clothes, the weird behavior of some characters). This could have predicted AI Video slop, in a way.
In the story, the very idea of permanently meat-based beings appals them, and in fact one of them doesn't entirely believe it. So why would they look like meat to "blend in", a priori, if one of them doesn't even fathom the idea? "Blend in" with what? One of them doesn't believe what it's dealing with!
Like a sibling comment mentions, they talk about "meat sounds"... using meat sounds! Why would they find it surprising if that's how they are communicating in the short film? They are not depicted as communicating via telepathy or whatever.
(Yes, I understand the limitations of low budget shorts. But it doesn't mean it has to work...)
You have a point. Maybe if I hadn't read the story first it would work better for me.
In the story, there's little doubt these are aliens (though their physical form, if they have any, is never described). If there's any doubt, it's about what they are talking about -- but this is dispelled pretty soon too.
I think the real reason is simply budget.
I can understand the limitations of working around budget, and constraints sometimes spark some inventive storytelling, like in the pretty cool "The Booth at the End", which has a very similar minimalistic setting in a diner! In fact, this short somewhat reminded me of that much better show.
(If you haven't watched "The Booth at the End", I strongly encourage you to do so... it used to be free online ages ago, not sure now).
> I'd imagine British spies in WWII sometimes wore swastikas to blend in?
British spies in WWII wouldn't do that if the entire concept of what a swastika was baffled them. You have to understand at least basically what the thing you're looking at is in order to use it as a symbol.
If you have _no_ concept of people being made out of meat being possible, you don't dress up as people made out of meat. You do that if it's a common concept to you and you're trying to fit in.
> And they do say they’ve studied and probed for several human lifetimes.
Only one of them has. The other is entirely surprised by the whole concept, and wouldn't even entertain disguising itself as something it has never considered and in fact it's being convinced during the story it even exists.
It's important for the story to work that one of the beings is entirely unconvinced and has to be told, as they discuss the matter, that this is an actual thing!
> He’s dressed like someone told “hey you have to try to blend in” and didn’t really know how.
Blend with what? It (the alien) didn't believe these "meat" sentient beings existed when the story starts! It had to be told during the conversation. It thought there must have been machines somewhere who were the real sentient beings. How can anyone attempt to blend in with something one doesn't believe exists?
I understand the adaptation changes this, because there's no other way of working with human actors and also staying within budget. I understand the decision; I'm just saying it misses the mark and makes the story way less funny.
The way I envision this story is a couple of aliens, much like the scenes with the Simpsons aliens, hovering in a spaceship near Earth, discussing humans, with only one of them having actually seen a human. It doesn't work if both have seen them.
All in my opinion, of course, taste and sense of humor are completely subjective.
Why? Surely one can criticize a movie, book, videogame, etc, without being required to create a better one in turn.
I didn't hate it, and I always appreciate the charm of low budget productions. I'm just saying this particular adaptation doesn't work for me, and trying to explain why.
One low budget feature-length film about aliens I quite liked (though it obviously has a higher budget, and of course its own set of flaws; and to be clear I'm not arguing both productions are in the same ballpark!) is "The Vast of Night" [1]. I quite liked the actors and the directorial choices.
Plus 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.
You 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.
I 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.
You'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?
More seriously, what you describe is partly the short story. The short film adaptation doesn't quite work for me, for the reasons I explained in other comments.
Yeah, I found this was definitely a case of "the book was much better than the movie", especially odd since most of the dialog was word-for-word, yet they skipped over the small parts that gave the story its lesson and relatability. Like the whole "officially or unofficially" part is one of my favorite parts of the original story, as it makes it seem like these intergalactic beings have to deal with the same concerns as Bob in corporate HR.
I think it highlights why the original text was uniquely brilliant and why it makes it reliably makes it to the top of HN every year or so.
Discarding 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.
Bisson 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."
"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".
Is 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
It 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.
I 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.
This 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.
> any such galactic intelligence would probably recognize that its predecessor were meat
Perhaps it's predecessor was just advanced enough to build self-modifying replicators and fire them out into space. Eventually it hits a planet or asteroid and gradually becomes sentient and intelligent. No trace of how it originated.
There's no refutation of anything here, I seriously thought about the possibility of evolution without meat, but you should be convince me otherwise if you can show me how it can arise naturally after big bang.
It's a discussion of reality stemming from an inspirational fiction. The whoosh apply to you.
Seriously...don't read any other science fiction stories. The things they write about that we can't indulge you by proving how they could possibly happen will make your head explode.
I think the point is that the story’s universe is populated by intelligent life forms that did not evolve from any lineage of meat. Hence the reference at the end to the hydrogen cluster.
It’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!?
Things like star and galaxy formation/interactions are (relatively) straightforward, with fairly simple processes/mechanics at the heart of it. It's easier to predict on such a large-scale what's going to happen.
Things are far more complex on a biological level, which makes it harder to make generalized predictions. I see no reason to infer that life would only consistently evolve into organic life as we know it.
By 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 :)
The 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.
Nature'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.
I 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.
If 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...
I 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).
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".
I 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...)
I 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.
I 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.
I 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.
It 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.
This 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.
> "“Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”"
What they cannot fathom is a sentient lifeform that achieves things but lives their entire lives as meat-based things, flapping their meat mouth parts to make disgusting meat sounds at each other. And I think they really never thought much about human reproduction!
As 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.
It's a good question, because I would say it's mostly not satire. It's kind of making fun of the perspective of thinking meat is unimpressive, but that's not exactly a view held by anyone except in the fiction of the story. I think toward the very very end tonally it veers close to a satirical vibe but it's hard to put a finger on what about it counts as satire strictly speaking.
I think basically the humor is how unimpressed they are with a Sagan-style sense of wonder at the cosmos that is implicitly treated as the human perspective, how bleak it would be if true. The aliens ridiculing that is funny, and the actual bleakness of it is funny too.
I think it's (partly) satirizing how we feel about ourselves as the apex beings, and as explorers of the cosmos and colonizers. What if we are actually quite subpar, and the actual apex beings in the universe find us so unlikely and disgusting that they prefer to pretend they are not there, thus giving an answer to Fermi's Paradox? They don't want to conquer us, they don't want to have anything to do with us!
But of course, it's also satirizing this alien-as-a-bug idea, so common of early scifi, that the alien is a disgusting mess of antennae or simly appendages. What if we were disgusting to enlightened aliens?
What we can absolutely be sure of is that Bisson wasn't making fun of meat or the human brain, the thought that apparently irked the topmost commenter.
I thought it was satirising faux-intellectual SF short stories that try to seem deeper than they are. If it’s just an actual faux-intellectual SF short story, that’s much less interesting.
On this planet, we’ve found that basically anything can be used to perform computation, electronics (semiconductors, vacuum tubes), mechanics (linkages, gears, cams, steel balls) , pneumatics, photonics, electromechanics, electrochemistry, optoelectronics, chemistry, phonons, hydraulics, even collectible card games. Donald Trump has said many dumb things, but he was right when he said “everything is computer”.
And almost anything has been used to transfer information. Light (fire, smoke, electricity, heated wires, coloured flags, mirrors, lasers, bioluminescence, LEDs, discharge tubes, electric arcs), sound (vibrating strings, membranes, tubes of air in hundreds of configurations, explosives, blunt objects), chemistry, electricity, electromagnetic radiation, waving body parts around, burning pieces of dead tree to make coloured marks on squished pieces of dead tree, magnetism, scratching into rocks, circles of aluminium with tiny holes in them embedded in plastic, transistors, circles of vinyl with wavy grooves cut in them, pieces of paper with tiny holes punched in them, rockets, flares.
So the notion that any advanced spacefaring civilisation would be astonished by any form of creature or communication method given how much variety there is on this one planet is hard to entertain, even as satire.
> I thought it was satirising faux-intellectual SF short stories that try to seem deeper than they are. If it’s just an actual faux-intellectual SF short story, that’s much less interesting.
I think it's neither. It's a humorous scifi story. Bisson had a sense of humor (much like, say, Asimov also had one and wrote many humorous stories that you'd best not overanalyze!).
> So the notion that any advanced spacefaring civilisation would be astonished by any form of creature or communication method given how much variety there is on this one planet is hard to entertain, even as satire.
It may be hard to entertain, but the trope this is riffing on was very well established in scifi. Many people still think in terms of mankind exploring and conquering new frontiers, space included.
You're overanalyzing this. It's satire, a joke story.
Part of the human expression of disgust includes thought terminating cliches. Imagine how the average person would talk about a race of bug-like aliens, no matter how advanced they were. It would be a dismissive kind of 'ew, gross'. The humor is in seeing other beings reacting that way to us. I don't think it's supposed to imply the aliens are some kind of flawless geniuses revealing the true nature of human beings.
How many of the billions of people alive have your perspective? How many of our leaders even, given the news in the last... let's say two weeks. But you can look at thousands of years of history and to me it still seems that people and their leaders don't share your view of "infinitely complex arrangements". I mean they might think such of themselves, but of "others", obviously not.
The story mentions some "official rules". Consider that we also have official rules and behaviour that does not obey them.
I dare suggest your own view might be reductionist.
I feel like the point of the story was that it was celebrating how spectacular the brain is, by showing how unlikely it would seem, and how incredulous another intelligent creature could be upon hearing of it if it weren't already built into their sense of normal.
It might be that this alternative cosmic sense of "normal" is not a real thing (meat may prove to be more cosmically normal than machine at the end of the day), but the sense of wonder in response to something as ridiculous as a brain, in its capabilities and its design, is a real feeling that the story is appropriately trying to evoke.
> As I’ve gotten older, it’s become increasingly hard for me to understand how anyone can read such comical reductionism as enlightenment.
First, it's a humorous piece.
Second, it's as much a critique of the aliens as of the humans. The aliens are also depicted as clueless about what makes human life interesting, and even shown to be petty in the end. Their behavior is entirely "human", so if they are criticizing humans for it...
Do 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.
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.
This is the funniest possible place attempt to open a hard problem of consciousness conversation, but also fitting because it makes it as ridiculous as I feel it actually is.
On another level even this clarification kind of misses the mark because many/most versions of the HPOC still treat physical substrate as a necessary condition, just not a sufficient one, sometimes will appeal to radio receivers, or the mental and physical being two aspects of the same underlying thing (sometimes called neutral monism). I personally think that view is mistaken and deeply confused, but even so, it's a view that ties consciousness to the substrate of "thinking meat" without reducing it, and would probably be a moot point from the aliens perspective.
Also by Terry Bisson and one of my favorite stories is Bears Discover Fire 1990 https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fi...
Is it me, or is there a subliminal message in the banner of LightSpeed magazine? No time to look into it, but there appears to be a changing message that flashes on and off to take the place of the "LIGHTSPEED" graphic in the banner. The only one I caught was "RESIST".
"Resist" and "Do not obey in advance". It's just an animated GIF.
There’s definitely something, I saw RESIST pop up for a flash as well.
I loved this story when I first read it. I made me feel wistful, like a world was dying and simultaneously being born. I can't explain it, but the idea of bears using fire has stayed with me ever since.
I'm reminded of an excellent surreal novel, "The Bear Comes Home" by Rafi Zabor, about an ursine jazz saxophonist.
Ok - bear mode activated: I'll add 'The Star Bear' by Michael Swanwick, where a man's series of encounters with a bear in Paris echo his feelings about being a Russian emigre.
https://reactormag.com/the-star-bear-michael-swanwick/
I didn't really get it to be honest. I feel like something went over my head.
Fair 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.
Same, I thought the newberries were going to be some sort of intelligence enhancer.
The short film someone made is pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg
The short film makes no sense, as the 2 people talking are meat themselves.
They only look like they're made of meat. And they only look like they're made of meat to you because you know you're made of meat, and they look like you.
To them, they're just disguised as "what the creatures on this planet look like," which is obviously (to them) not meat, because they've never seen meat beings. To them, we are obviously not-meat, although how we appear is compatible with being meat. But silicone dyed the correct shade can look like meat. Stone painted the right color can look like meat.
And if you say that silicone and stone don't look like meat even when prepared to copy it, bear in mind that we are made of meat and very good at distinguishing it. Different races favor different attributes for distinguishing one person from another, hence why "they all look alike" is somewhat true for pretty much any "them" you care to name. Rocky from Project Hail Mary almost certainly thinks all humans look alike.
"probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
The two talking, and other races, are machines that cover themselves however they like. These two are machines with artificial skins. That is normal. Fully meat beings are not. At least that is how I always read this story.
Machines with artificial skins? I'll have to re-read the story, I thought the "meat" was matter and the aliens were made of energy.
No, it's literal meat that they have issues with. Machines are fine, hydrogen clusters are fine.
You should probably go watch the Terminator movies.
I interpreted this in two different ways:
* This is a virtual environment and the "meat actors" are depicting avatars of virtual/not-meat entities inhabiting that world. That's why there's inconsistencies with real life, for example the red guy's clothes. This was what I thought when I first saw this short.
* This was really an exchange of concepts and data in a language not really suitable for humans to understand. So what you are seeing is not what actually took place, but a translation. Some machine took the abstract data interchange and translated it to what it thought would be more appropriate for a meat head to understand, including setting it up in an environment that would make sense to a human. But it made some mistakes (the clothes, the weird behavior of some characters). This could have predicted AI Video slop, in a way.
They only look like meat to blend in. It's the only way to figure out if they're made out of meat.
> They only look like meat to blend in. It's the only way to figure out if they're made out of meat.
Perhaps the makers of the movie neglected to read the story before creating a script?
In the story, the very idea of permanently meat-based beings appals them, and in fact one of them doesn't entirely believe it. So why would they look like meat to "blend in", a priori, if one of them doesn't even fathom the idea? "Blend in" with what? One of them doesn't believe what it's dealing with!
Like a sibling comment mentions, they talk about "meat sounds"... using meat sounds! Why would they find it surprising if that's how they are communicating in the short film? They are not depicted as communicating via telepathy or whatever.
(Yes, I understand the limitations of low budget shorts. But it doesn't mean it has to work...)
It's partly for dramatic purposes, to slow the realisation of the audience that they are aliens talking about people.
And, ofc, in-drama logic; the beings (of silicon or whatever) are/were blending in with humans to study them.
You have a point. Maybe if I hadn't read the story first it would work better for me.
In the story, there's little doubt these are aliens (though their physical form, if they have any, is never described). If there's any doubt, it's about what they are talking about -- but this is dispelled pretty soon too.
I think the real reason is simply budget.
I can understand the limitations of working around budget, and constraints sometimes spark some inventive storytelling, like in the pretty cool "The Booth at the End", which has a very similar minimalistic setting in a diner! In fact, this short somewhat reminded me of that much better show.
(If you haven't watched "The Booth at the End", I strongly encourage you to do so... it used to be free online ages ago, not sure now).
> So why would they look like meat to "blend in", a priori, if one of them doesn't even fathom the idea?
I'd imagine British spies in WWII sometimes wore swastikas to blend in?
They infiltrating to investigate. It needn't be an endorsement of the practice.
> I'd imagine British spies in WWII sometimes wore swastikas to blend in?
British spies in WWII wouldn't do that if the entire concept of what a swastika was baffled them. You have to understand at least basically what the thing you're looking at is in order to use it as a symbol.
If you have _no_ concept of people being made out of meat being possible, you don't dress up as people made out of meat. You do that if it's a common concept to you and you're trying to fit in.
But they mention species with a meat phase.
The concept of meat isn’t foreign. Meat that’s sentient and has no cybernetic parts or phase is.
And they do say they’ve studied and probed for several human lifetimes.
> And they do say they’ve studied and probed for several human lifetimes.
Only one of them has. The other is entirely surprised by the whole concept, and wouldn't even entertain disguising itself as something it has never considered and in fact it's being convinced during the story it even exists.
It's important for the story to work that one of the beings is entirely unconvinced and has to be told, as they discuss the matter, that this is an actual thing!
The one that looks super goofy?
He’s dressed like someone told “hey you have to try to blend in” and didn’t really know how.
Picking the right name is also important to blending in. For example: Ford Prefect.
Tom Noonan in the short film, yes.
> He’s dressed like someone told “hey you have to try to blend in” and didn’t really know how.
Blend with what? It (the alien) didn't believe these "meat" sentient beings existed when the story starts! It had to be told during the conversation. It thought there must have been machines somewhere who were the real sentient beings. How can anyone attempt to blend in with something one doesn't believe exists?
I understand the adaptation changes this, because there's no other way of working with human actors and also staying within budget. I understand the decision; I'm just saying it misses the mark and makes the story way less funny.
The way I envision this story is a couple of aliens, much like the scenes with the Simpsons aliens, hovering in a spaceship near Earth, discussing humans, with only one of them having actually seen a human. It doesn't work if both have seen them.
All in my opinion, of course, taste and sense of humor are completely subjective.
Well, if you think you can do a better job, make it happen. Make the film you want to see.
Why? Surely one can criticize a movie, book, videogame, etc, without being required to create a better one in turn.
I didn't hate it, and I always appreciate the charm of low budget productions. I'm just saying this particular adaptation doesn't work for me, and trying to explain why.
One low budget feature-length film about aliens I quite liked (though it obviously has a higher budget, and of course its own set of flaws; and to be clear I'm not arguing both productions are in the same ballpark!) is "The Vast of Night" [1]. I quite liked the actors and the directorial choices.
---
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6803046/
You're interpreting it overly literally. Cinema can be as abstract as theatre or the written word.
Plus 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.
You 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.
I 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.
You'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?
Oh yes. But never dressed up as X! :D
More seriously, what you describe is partly the short story. The short film adaptation doesn't quite work for me, for the reasons I explained in other comments.
It was funny when they talked about meat sounds using meat sounds.
I like that the bearded one can't help cracking up when he says "the ones you probed": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg&t=285s
It's a good visualization but they skipped the punchline, which was the entire purpose of the story.
Yeah, I found this was definitely a case of "the book was much better than the movie", especially odd since most of the dialog was word-for-word, yet they skipped over the small parts that gave the story its lesson and relatability. Like the whole "officially or unofficially" part is one of my favorite parts of the original story, as it makes it seem like these intergalactic beings have to deal with the same concerns as Bob in corporate HR.
I think it highlights why the original text was uniquely brilliant and why it makes it reliably makes it to the top of HN every year or so.
I'm a big fan of Tom Noonan (the character in red). He unfortunately passed away a few weeks ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Noonan
Agreed! I love the saxophone riff for the opening/closing song.
Also, funny to see Ben Bailey outside of a taxi cab.
Discarding 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.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 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
> 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.
Previously...
They're Made Out of Meat (1991) - 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 - Nov 2023 (168 comments)
They're made out of meat (1991) - 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 - Oct 2020 (292 comments)
They're Made Out of Meat [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436550 - June 2020 (4 comments)
They're Made Out of Meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561522 - April 2016 (3 comments)
They're made out of meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8910420 - Jan 2015 (1 comment)
They're Made out of Meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152131 - Aug 2014 (170 comments)
They're made out of meat - 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 - Feb 2012 (62 comments)
They're made out of Meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774139 - Aug 2009 (3 comments)
I made this ASCII visualization for the radio play of “They’re Made Out of Meat”: https://asciinema.org/a/746358
Brandon Sanderson (very prolific fantasy author) has a novella inspired by this: * Original: https://www.brandonsanderson.com/blogs/blog/i-hate-dragons
* Extended: https://www.brandonsanderson.com/blogs/blog/i-hate-dragons-e...
Bisson 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."
"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".
This American Life also did a good narration of this in Act 2 of episode 803 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/803
Bad URL, but this YouTube clip works for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5usXhX0zaO4
good callout - https://www.thisamericanlife.org/803/transcript
Related: Carl Sagan's Cosmos resampled to make a "Meat Planet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP7K9SycELA
Earlier I found it awe-inspiring. Nowadays I find it funny because we have yet to even remotely approach the complexity of meat.
It's amazing how consciousness remains a mystery given all the scientific progress over the last 100 years
Consciousness had millions of years headstart. Give it time.
Is 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
It 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.
I 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-o...
I suggest this vocal performance: https://youtube.com/watch?v=GggK9SjJpuQ
This 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.
> any such galactic intelligence would probably recognize that its predecessor were meat
Perhaps it's predecessor was just advanced enough to build self-modifying replicators and fire them out into space. Eventually it hits a planet or asteroid and gradually becomes sentient and intelligent. No trace of how it originated.
Thanks for doing a "well AKTually" on a piece of amusing fiction.
There's no refutation of anything here, I seriously thought about the possibility of evolution without meat, but you should be convince me otherwise if you can show me how it can arise naturally after big bang.
It's a discussion of reality stemming from an inspirational fiction. The whoosh apply to you.
Seriously...don't read any other science fiction stories. The things they write about that we can't indulge you by proving how they could possibly happen will make your head explode.
Edit: spelling
I think the point is that the story’s universe is populated by intelligent life forms that did not evolve from any lineage of meat. Hence the reference at the end to the hydrogen cluster.
The race of meat people are humans, though. So it's our universe.
It’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!?
You seem to be lacking in imagination.
I think they are abound in sarcasm :).
Things like star and galaxy formation/interactions are (relatively) straightforward, with fairly simple processes/mechanics at the heart of it. It's easier to predict on such a large-scale what's going to happen.
Things are far more complex on a biological level, which makes it harder to make generalized predictions. I see no reason to infer that life would only consistently evolve into organic life as we know it.
Why would it's predecessors need to be meat, besides for you own absence of imagination
If 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.
Somehow this story isn't as fun today as it was when first printed ...
By 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 :)
The 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.
Nature'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.
they are not
> It was incredible man. Mold on a rock that got to think. Ha, it was amazing while it lasted
Is including an iFrame to Terry Bison's website reprinting?
I 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.
So, Link, it's all very straightforward and scientific if you just think about it carefully for a moment : we're made out of pixels.
Great short film version: 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.
If 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...
I 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_mad...
Depends 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".
I 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...)
see also Stanisław Lem
I 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.
I 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.
They 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.”
I 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.
Maybe it’s lab grown in a future and not tied to animals in any way. Just for food.
The 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.
I 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.
It 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.
This 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.
> Do they already know what meat is?
Yes, they do:
> "“Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”"
What they cannot fathom is a sentient lifeform that achieves things but lives their entire lives as meat-based things, flapping their meat mouth parts to make disgusting meat sounds at each other. And I think they really never thought much about human reproduction!
As 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.
I 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.
> 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?
It's a good question, because I would say it's mostly not satire. It's kind of making fun of the perspective of thinking meat is unimpressive, but that's not exactly a view held by anyone except in the fiction of the story. I think toward the very very end tonally it veers close to a satirical vibe but it's hard to put a finger on what about it counts as satire strictly speaking.
I think basically the humor is how unimpressed they are with a Sagan-style sense of wonder at the cosmos that is implicitly treated as the human perspective, how bleak it would be if true. The aliens ridiculing that is funny, and the actual bleakness of it is funny too.
> What is it satirizing?
I think it's (partly) satirizing how we feel about ourselves as the apex beings, and as explorers of the cosmos and colonizers. What if we are actually quite subpar, and the actual apex beings in the universe find us so unlikely and disgusting that they prefer to pretend they are not there, thus giving an answer to Fermi's Paradox? They don't want to conquer us, they don't want to have anything to do with us!
But of course, it's also satirizing this alien-as-a-bug idea, so common of early scifi, that the alien is a disgusting mess of antennae or simly appendages. What if we were disgusting to enlightened aliens?
What we can absolutely be sure of is that Bisson wasn't making fun of meat or the human brain, the thought that apparently irked the topmost commenter.
I thought it was satirising faux-intellectual SF short stories that try to seem deeper than they are. If it’s just an actual faux-intellectual SF short story, that’s much less interesting.
On this planet, we’ve found that basically anything can be used to perform computation, electronics (semiconductors, vacuum tubes), mechanics (linkages, gears, cams, steel balls) , pneumatics, photonics, electromechanics, electrochemistry, optoelectronics, chemistry, phonons, hydraulics, even collectible card games. Donald Trump has said many dumb things, but he was right when he said “everything is computer”.
And almost anything has been used to transfer information. Light (fire, smoke, electricity, heated wires, coloured flags, mirrors, lasers, bioluminescence, LEDs, discharge tubes, electric arcs), sound (vibrating strings, membranes, tubes of air in hundreds of configurations, explosives, blunt objects), chemistry, electricity, electromagnetic radiation, waving body parts around, burning pieces of dead tree to make coloured marks on squished pieces of dead tree, magnetism, scratching into rocks, circles of aluminium with tiny holes in them embedded in plastic, transistors, circles of vinyl with wavy grooves cut in them, pieces of paper with tiny holes punched in them, rockets, flares.
So the notion that any advanced spacefaring civilisation would be astonished by any form of creature or communication method given how much variety there is on this one planet is hard to entertain, even as satire.
> I thought it was satirising faux-intellectual SF short stories that try to seem deeper than they are. If it’s just an actual faux-intellectual SF short story, that’s much less interesting.
I think it's neither. It's a humorous scifi story. Bisson had a sense of humor (much like, say, Asimov also had one and wrote many humorous stories that you'd best not overanalyze!).
> So the notion that any advanced spacefaring civilisation would be astonished by any form of creature or communication method given how much variety there is on this one planet is hard to entertain, even as satire.
It may be hard to entertain, but the trope this is riffing on was very well established in scifi. Many people still think in terms of mankind exploring and conquering new frontiers, space included.
You're overanalyzing this. It's satire, a joke story.
Rainier Wolfcastle: THAT'S THE JOKE
Part of the human expression of disgust includes thought terminating cliches. Imagine how the average person would talk about a race of bug-like aliens, no matter how advanced they were. It would be a dismissive kind of 'ew, gross'. The humor is in seeing other beings reacting that way to us. I don't think it's supposed to imply the aliens are some kind of flawless geniuses revealing the true nature of human beings.
Sentient plants that move quickly would be another case of us humans going "WTF?!?!"
"They're made out of wires!"
"Oh god, you're right! They're all just tiny pieces of rubber and silicon, transistors and circuits all crammed chaotically together! How horrifying!"
How many of the billions of people alive have your perspective? How many of our leaders even, given the news in the last... let's say two weeks. But you can look at thousands of years of history and to me it still seems that people and their leaders don't share your view of "infinitely complex arrangements". I mean they might think such of themselves, but of "others", obviously not.
The story mentions some "official rules". Consider that we also have official rules and behaviour that does not obey them.
I dare suggest your own view might be reductionist.
I feel like the point of the story was that it was celebrating how spectacular the brain is, by showing how unlikely it would seem, and how incredulous another intelligent creature could be upon hearing of it if it weren't already built into their sense of normal.
It might be that this alternative cosmic sense of "normal" is not a real thing (meat may prove to be more cosmically normal than machine at the end of the day), but the sense of wonder in response to something as ridiculous as a brain, in its capabilities and its design, is a real feeling that the story is appropriately trying to evoke.
You must be fun at parties.
It's comedy. You might not find it funny, but it's rather small-minded to suggest that no one else could find it funny.
> As I’ve gotten older, it’s become increasingly hard for me to understand how anyone can read such comical reductionism as enlightenment.
First, it's a humorous piece.
Second, it's as much a critique of the aliens as of the humans. The aliens are also depicted as clueless about what makes human life interesting, and even shown to be petty in the end. Their behavior is entirely "human", so if they are criticizing humans for it...
> 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."
Do 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.
Well, 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?
Of 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.
This is the funniest possible place attempt to open a hard problem of consciousness conversation, but also fitting because it makes it as ridiculous as I feel it actually is.
On another level even this clarification kind of misses the mark because many/most versions of the HPOC still treat physical substrate as a necessary condition, just not a sufficient one, sometimes will appeal to radio receivers, or the mental and physical being two aspects of the same underlying thing (sometimes called neutral monism). I personally think that view is mistaken and deeply confused, but even so, it's a view that ties consciousness to the substrate of "thinking meat" without reducing it, and would probably be a moot point from the aliens perspective.
It's electrical signals... Inside your meat
So the power grid is having experiences? Computers too?
Where does the simulation happen inside a computer.
The hard problem of consciousness isn't.