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Life Definition

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Posted by Hartley DiBianca on April 6, 2001 00:39:00 UTC

I suppose life could be classified as any collection of matter/energy with a finite existence that began and with end, death. Life only exists because it is the alternative to death. This definition seems to big, because while it would accurately include plants, micro=organisms, and animals, it would also include almost everything. A chair would be life under this definition. When it is constructed it is born and when it meets its fate, in a fire for example, it dies.

Perhaps for a more useful definition we would include things such as the ability to grow, reproduce, and die for any piece of material to meet the definition of life. Then we might also seperate life into two categories, life that is self aware and life that is not. It seems most life would not be self aware, conscience, or intelligent.

If the definition of life is simply to grow, reproduce, and die, then we have a basis for the basic forms of life, single celled organisms, all the way to humans. Single cells grow and split, one become two, two become four. Perhaps a simpler (and maybe more efficient?) way of reproduction than our own animal multi sex way.

I am no biologist, but these are my thoughts on life. Of coure, on a small enough level my own body would not be classified as life. If you were shrunk down and were traveling from atom to atom in a space ship my body would just be a collection of atoms, would it not?

Perhaps life is order on any "level", that can always be broken down to disorder. To qualify, the orderly particles must be trying to replicate this order.

Life seems to build and fade, build and fade, build and fade. Who knows how many instances of life there have been in the universe that have no trace at all, and how far each instance came in its evolution.

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