This is a classic story and fun in its own way, but thinking about humanity future reach for the stars (provided it happens) will most likely require us to move to some trans human form. Think transformers or sentient ships. The human life is too short and body is too fragile for cosmic voyages. If we are going to be advanced enough to build interstellar ships, we should be advanced enough to travel in a different vessel.

Arthur C Clarke wrote a story which contains the same core conceit:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusade_(short_story)

Edit: I see the wikipedia page does a poor job of describing the story. The essence is that a silicon, cold intelligence cannot believe intelligence could develop in carbon in relatively high temperatures. It decides that the meat intelligences are oppressing the silicon intelligences they have created and launches a crusade.

The argument this relates to - will machines be able to think - seems to have died out rather. Back in the day people worried about things like John Searle's Chinese Room argument as a philosophical proof that computers wouldn't be able to understand stuff. I always thought the Chinese Room thing was a bit silly and the Meat story a good rebuttal.

I guess these days computers have advanced enough that the worry is more will Facebook's AI use it's understanding of us in bad ways rather than will machines be able to understand.

Terry Bisson is worth checking out if you like this story. “Bears Discover Fire and other stories” for instance is a story collection (obviously). It has some funny ones like this one in it and some more serious, like the title story which won a Hugo and Nebula. I remember originally reading it in Asimov’s magazine.

A performance of this: https://youtu.be/7tScAyNaRdQ

If God didn't mean for people to eat other people, then we wouldn't be made out of meat.

(To paraphrase Flanders and Swan's song, "The Reluctant Cannibal".)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjAHw2DEBgw

It is well-written, but I wonder if meat vs non-meat is really the question that should be discussed.

Seems to me, the "rift" (if there is one) is more along the line if thinking and consciousness are "ordinary" physical processes that happen as part of biology - or if they are metaphysical events that take place on a wholly different spiritual plane than our world and are not accessible to physics at all.

If you belong to the former camp, I imagine AIs, non-carbon-based life and other things like this aren't hard to accept as a concept - and if you belong to the latter camp, then I imagine the idea that thinking, feeling and consciousness happens in our brain is already problematic, no need to look at other life forms.

I've probably read this 100 times by now. It's still good the 101st time. Sentient meat, indeed.

If curious see also

2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152131

2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3549320

(those are the two big previous threads - there are smaller ones at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

> They can travel to other planets in special meat containers

This is funny, but it's actually how I think about cars.

Traveling on a bike, motorbike, horse, whatever, where you can feel the air outside is so much better. But being packed in a closed container...

Planes, cars, trains are obviously orders of magnitude more efficient than the "open" options, but they feel unpleasant and unnatural.

We tricked rocks and electricity into thinking for us.

Are we just sacks of meat/water our DNA tricked into working for it?

For life

Means:

Buying meat Quartering meat

Killing meat Adoring meat

Impregnating meat Cursing meat

Teaching meat and burying meat

And making out of meat And thinking with meat

And in the name of meat In spite of meat

For the tomorrow of meat For the end of meat

Especially especially in defense of meat

– Stanisław Grochowiak, The Burning Giraffe

Am I the only one who doesn’t find this funny?

It's a shame whoever put it at MIT didn't credit the author, the excellent Terry Bisson. Here it is on his home page:

http://www.terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/

The author's page for it is http://www.terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/

This short story was recently mentioned when Kara Swisher interviewed Elon Musk in the NYT. I hadn't heard about this story before so it registered for me.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/opinion/sway-kara-swisher...

Why would non “meat” intelligence have any concept of “meat”? And if they did, why would they be so surprised? The plot holes are glaring.

A couple of month ago I wrote a very short story here on HN that is embarassingly close to this one both in style as in topic (but created without (at least conscious?) knowledge of it though). A few people liked it, so here is the link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22053288

The first couple of lines of this are the opening lines in the Andy Clark's fascinating book on predictive brain theory: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25823558-surfing-uncerta...

Although my body is made of meat too I can hardly believe this is possible. Like if we were made of marshmallow or something.

This reads like a Robert Sheckley short story. I never understood the fuss about Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy. To me, Robert Sheckley is the master of witty, provocative sci-fi short form. Douglas Adams is seems like random absurd for the sake of absurd. And yes Douglas Adams openly said he was inspired by Sheckley.

“An intelligent carrot? The mind boggles!” — The Thing[1] (from another world), John W. Campbell, Howard Hawks, et al

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_from_Another_World

The Body Worlds exhibits 15 years ago highlighted the fact humans are mostly like the meat you see in the meat department. Only medical doctors saw much of this before.

(Both grocery stores and BW plastination colourize tissues to make them stand out. Otherwise it more gray and beige.)

First time I was aware of this terrific story was through a great radio version, playable here:

https://www.wnyc.org/story/168264-theyre-made-out-of-meat/

Ironically, the whole setup implies a conversation between two intelligent beings that is totally modeled after ours. One would justify this with "it's written this way because of translation into English". Funny anyway, plussing.

I was missing the question mark and immediately thought of Soylent Green [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green

https://www.scribd.com/doc/100964572/Larry-Niven-Bordered-in...

This story never made sense to me. If they know about meat, then they know about intelligent creatures made of it, for some value of intelligence. Otherwise where would the meat they have seen come from?

There is also a short film based on the short-story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ

Having teenagers around can change the way we read passages like this:

"You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other."

Or maybe that was intended by the writer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ

I never liked this story. Meat, according to Wikipedia, is "animal flesh that is eaten as food". So they're familiar with biological creatures very similar to those on earth, and they eat them? But at the same time, they have trouble with the concept that biological creatures can have some degree of intelligence? That's just nonsense.

And why then do they keep using this term "meat", which refers only to some parts of animals?

Maybe that's just me, but I feel like the point of the story is to gross the reader out by repeatedly calling them "meat". ;)

All the cake memes are remixes of this story as far as I'm concerned

What if we really are the only one in the universe at this moment?

Time passes and we manage to do interstellar and even intergalactic travel at some point. Then millions of years pass by and all, still “Human” but now “N”, civilizations are exploring the universe and if they’ve forgotten or re-learned where they come from they can “discover” far away life that to them didn’t originate from the same place as they did, as we all did. To them they’d be aliens.

I’m sure there’s someone out there that already has done something along those lines. The Expanse on Prime Video had the Martians vs. Humans and they looked quite different in just a few thousand(?) years. Imagine millions of years of survival in opposite sides of the universe.

Ultimately, this is a lampoon of people who think they are better than some others.

Guess what, bigots! You're all just so much more meat, and not fit for galactic society.

This is great.

This is apparently the 16th time this has been submitted to Hacker News. I wonder if that's some kind of record:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I find the whole premise odd. Meat is fundamentally associated with living creatures. How could you have a concept of meat and simultaneously find it weird that creatures would be composed of it?