They’re Made out of Meat | East of the Web

Takeaways

Terry Bisson’s classic short story: alien intelligence discovers humans are entirely meat—born meat, die meat, brains made of meat—yet transmit radio via machines meat built.
Dialogue format exposes absurdity of “thinking meat” and consciousness embodied in flesh; aliens reluctant to contact sentient meat directly.
Humans use machines to talk to the stars; signals aren’t from the meat itself—layered irony about substrate vs. capability.
Cultural touchstone for sci-fi humor and philosophical alien-POV on human cognition; source material for Leiter’s “They’re Made Out of Weights” parody.

Full text clipping from East of the Web. Reading-lane reference; no direct vault workflow tie-in beyond LLM metaphor lineage.