Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

It's not like there's a definition of life people universally agree on.

But the only life we know... is cells. Unless you count viruses. Which most biologists don't.

Still viruses are very specifically adapted to life on earth, everything contains DNA and RNA. Maybe this is the only form of life that is chemically possible, maybe there are many alternatives.

If you define 'life' as "any process that sits at the boundary between low to high entropy to make more of itself, and is subject to natural selection and evolution to produce diversity" then I'm sure there's all sorts of things that can be described that way. Maybe even things as "mundane" as the cloud patterns of Jupiter, or some internal processes inside a star? And would we even recognize these things if we saw them, most of the time?

... But the kind of thing people mean by "life" colloquially is really multicellular or at least eukaryotic life, which only arose on earth like 600 million years ago, which is only like 15% of the time that life in the more strict sense (bacteria/archae) has existed here.

Folks, I don't usually do popularity contests, but I'm trying to figure out why I'm being downvoted into oblivion here. Earlier today I was upvoted a bunch, now I'm -3, and..

I don't really see much of controversy in what I said here?

Yeah but what about the really big viruses??

Some microbiologists think they are alive: https://www.nature.com/articles/454677a Others don't think so: https://virology.ws/2020/12/03/pandoraviruses-are-not-alive/

I find that these conversations are almost always backwards, as "is X alive" actually handled as "should we consider X as alive".

That is we are not trying to discover whether a thing is alive or not, we are trying to decide what Alive means.

This confusion creates the illusion that terms like Life, consciousness, emotions, reflexes, etc. are well defined while they in practice are not.

There is no such thing as alive, the word is a human invention. We can decide what the word means.

That was my the point, these conversations are linguistically phrased as trying to estabilish if something is alive but are actually structured as a debate on what "alive" means

Its a semantic argument. People agree on how these things work, they don't agree on defining it as one way or another. I'm in favor of viruses being a form of life. The argument against them being a form of life is that they can't replicate themselves without a host. To that I say, neither can us humans. Go on, sit in a field and try and replicate yourself without a host. It can't be done. Ergo, according to some virologist, you are not alive. Whether that host is a cell or another parent is semantics, since its the same situation just at a different level of abstraction essentially (whole organism vs microbe).

I think it’s just a discussion about terminology. Finding something like a virus on mars (and actually recognizing it), would be a huge breakthrough.

> Finding something like a virus on mars (and actually recognizing it), would be a huge breakthrough.

I hope it wouldn’t be a huge breakthrough for the virus

Reply on news.ycombinator.com