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Carrion Luggage #1097110 added September 11, 2025 at 9:19am
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That's Life
Discussions like this one in Big Think have been going on for a long time, and will continue.
Okay, but I'd think that's inevitable, since we don't and can't know everything.
Defining exactly what we mean by “life” — in all its varied forms — has long been a formidable challenge.
Some things resist easy categorization.
Physicist Erwin Schrödinger wrote a book titled What is Life? in 1944.
I haven't read the book, so I wonder: is the title question asked in a tone like a little kid asking their parents the Big Questions?
By the traditional dictionary definition, “life” requires metabolism, growth, replication, and adaptation to the environment. Most scientists, therefore, don’t consider viruses alive because they can’t reproduce and grow by themselves and do not metabolize. Yet they possess a genetic mechanism that enables them to reproduce, with the help of a living cell.
So the problem here, as I see it, is one of categorization, not of science. Not to mention "traditional dictionary definitions" aren't the same thing as scientific definitions. But mostly, we like to label things and put them in clearly-divided cubbies. Unfortunately for us, things are rarely that neat. For another, simpler example, consider the uproar when the definition of "planet" was set up, and the definition excluded Pluto. But people can make up their own set boundaries (they just won't be accepted by science). If you want to expand the definition of "life" to include any reproducing system, you can do that. It may not comport with what we colloquially know as "life," but you can do it.
Because astrobiologists think not only about life as we know it but also life as we might find it, some of them gravitated toward the broad definition of life proposed by NASA: “A self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”
I'm sure a great deal of thought went into that definition, but it seems pretty broad from my outside point of view. The article questions it, too.
As usual, when considering such questions, we’re hampered by our limited state of knowledge.
Well, yeah. If we didn't lack the knowledge, we wouldn't be seeking it, would we? You can use "hampered," but I might have picked "challenged."
There is also the N=1 problem. How can we expect to arrive at a good definition of life when we have only one example: life on Earth?
Well, see, we can't even arrive at a good definition for life on Earth, as the article shows. If we find stuff on another planet that quacks like life and waddles like life, we'll call it "life," and modify the definition accordingly.
That's not how science works, I know, but again, the categorization question isn't really a science question, but a philosophy question that needs to be informed by science.
Maybe it’s partly a linguistic question. Grammatically speaking, “life” is a noun. But in biological terms, it’s more like a verb — more of a process than a thing. Defining life is something like defining wind, which describes air in motion — a state of being rather than a specific object. Wind molecules are the same as those of air, but their dynamic state is what defines them.
Okay, but there are processes that we don't define as life: the hydrologic cycle, for instance; or fire.
Maybe we should be consulting philosophers.
Finally.
I'm not sure if I was really clear above, so I'll reiterate this: Sure, we don't know. As I noted a few days ago, the universe is large and, practically, no one can explore it completely; consequently, there will always be things we don't know. And to me, that's a good thing; it means we can still learn. |
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