The more I thought about this, the more I realized that under any logical definition of life, you always had gray areas which are difficult to categorize and reconcile. For example:
- A self catalyzing bag of chemicals (ie. a bag of chemicals that facilitates its own replication). It reproduces. It interacts with the surrounding environment. So why is it not alive?
- A virus. Conventional wisdom dictates that viruses are not alive, as they are not self-sufficient - they must directly co-opt another living organism in order to survive. But why does that matter? And how does that differ from all the other organisms which rely on others to survive? (Albeit in a much less direct matter)
- A few years ago, modelling suggested that under certain but very much possible conditions, interstellar clouds of plasma (for the rest of you, a plasma is the "fourth state" of matter [there are five], whereby the electrons of atoms are stripped away, leaving the whole thing very sensitive to electric and magnetic fields) could organize themselves into helical structures and start behaving a way that was very suggestive of life. Big dust cloud, but alive. Very science-fictiony.
- On a more fundamental level, how about an artificial intelligence, controlling a factory or software? Self-replicating, can evolve (if it's a full AI), interacts with environment. At what stage do artificial constructs or pieces of code become "alive"? (Think Geth from Mass Effect) Can they ever come alive?
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This post, for the curious, was inspired by this report: Scientists Take First Step Towards Creating 'Inorganic Life'
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