I love how they've said "constrained to C space".<p>Many people say speed of light is the absolute speed limit of anything or information can travel. Sure it is, which is easily proven by physics. But the physics we know of applies to what we know. There might be something completely different to what we're seeing/observing/theoritising with our smartest people and best equipment.<p>I'm not saying we can just go faster than C by advancing technology: I know it's limited by relativity and is not a matter of advancing tech.<p>What I'm saying is that there will probably be advancements in physics and technology so that C limit will of course stay the same, but it will be the physics <i>inside the box</i> whereas a complete new understanding of reality <i>outside the box</i> would be discovered, where things can travel "faster" than C using other dimensions or something that we even haven't thought of yet "outside the box", while still being perfectly compatible with the "regular" "inside the box" physics we love and use today, without violating and relativity rules of our classical physics.<p>Then they'll probably look back and just laugh at the people who thought C was the absolute limit to everything.
Another of Terry Bisson's short stories, "Bears Discover Fire", is an absolute gem, and free to read online: <a href="https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fire/" rel="nofollow">https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fi...</a>
My favorite film adaptation of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ</a>
It's great.<p>Author is still living... <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Bisson" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Bisson</a><p>Many times on HN; I'm good with that.<p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Terry+Bisson" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Terry+Bisson</a>
Related:<p><i>They're Made Out of Meat (1991)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737993" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737993</a> - Oct 2020 (292 comments)<p><i>They're Made Out of Meat [video]</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436550" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436550</a> - June 2020 (4 comments)<p><i>They're made out of meat</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8910420" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8910420</a> - Jan 2015 (1 comment)<p><i>They're Made out of Meat</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152131" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152131</a> - Aug 2014 (170 comments)<p><i>"They're Made out of Meat?" Short first contact sci-fi story</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3549320" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3549320</a> - Feb 2012 (62 comments)<p><i>They're made out of Meat</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774139" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774139</a> - Aug 2009 (3 comments)
I never liked the story. The premise that a sentient lifeform would be able to traverse the universe, make contact with wildly different lifeforms, but somehow scoff at the idea of "meat lifeforms" is inconceivable, even stretching my suspension of disbelief to its limits. Especially since the explorers in the story have managed to decipher our communications, our culture (mentioning that we sing) and probed our biology.
Another good short story: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/519498a" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/519498a</a>
The short film by Stephen O'Regan based on this is pretty good if you haven't seen it: <a href="https://youtu.be/T6JFTmQCFHg" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/T6JFTmQCFHg</a>
This story is cool but it’s premise always bugged me. “meat” as a concept emerges from our own experience. From an alien point of view, “meat” would appear first as some kind of programmable nanotechnology matter, which is far from the trivialness we express when we talk about “meat”
Since we're talking SciFi, one of the most interesting treatments of space-time is Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep", in which there are different zone of the galaxy that have different space-time characteristics. I find this more interesting than the usual "faster-than-light drive" or "wormhole" sorts of SciFi. (Us engineers are clearly stupid; we actually need to make real things work. SciFi writers just write a high level description, assume that its works as designed, and start the next chapter! :-)
This story never made any sense. If you know what meat is, you are also familiar with large animals with some degree of intelligence. Can’t have one without the other.
@tux3 human brains are constipated. Our current interpretation of data like that from Hubble is that space is expanding. But it could equally be that matter is contracting. Space is the absence of matter. You cannot increase space anymore than you can add ‘cold’to a glass of water. By assuming that light is invariant, we would observe decreasing light frequencies as we measure older light.because We and our rulers have ‘shrunk’. This interpretation also eliminates the need for inventing dark matter and dark energy to explain our observations