How Do You Define Life?

The Meaning of Life may be more accessible than the definition of life itself

Life is difficult to define. One difficulty is that we cannot define anything without language. Language is flexible, and so are ideas.

There is fundamental agreement that life displays homeostasis, replication, growth, nutrition intake and expulsion, and responsiveness.

How we define life, and who researches life, often depends upon whether one is a biologist, geneticist, chemist, or astronomer.

But most of us are none of these things, yet we walk about the earth with a generally accepted sense that we know what life is. Human beings are still a long way off from agreeing what life is. We more routinely can agree upon what life is not.

A rock is not alive. A person dead for five years is not alive. A book is not alive. But when it comes to borderline cases, we often fall into the aforementioned language, and meaning traps. A rock may not be alive, but a rock can contain lots of microbial life known as Endoliths.

Life, however foreign to our sensibilities as extremophiles, has been found in crystals deep in inhospitable caves, in boiling thermal ponds, and is found up to two miles beneath the earth’s surface, and is speculated to even exist more deeply.

Death, it seems, really is easier to identify. A person, or other animal, dead for ten minutes can be revitalized. A book may not breathe, but the ideas it contains often bring its author back to life, and prompts more literature, suggesting replication.

A virus is considered alive by many. An infectious protein, such as a prion, is also considered alive by many microbiologists.

Another living entity is a beehive. It does all the necessary steps to thrive and grow, but something about our human intelligence does not want to consider such a conglomerate as “life.”

Many living beings cannot reproduce at all, or cannot do so without dependency on other organisms. Narrowly, this includes beings from parasites to mules. More broadly, we cannot exist without ties to billions of other organisms.

However, we rarely think of mules as non-living, and we most certainly consider ourselves to be prime representatives…

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