What is Life? Is Death Real?

Life is fundamentally different from dead stuff—or is it? Physicist Erwin Scrhödinger defined life this way: Living things avoid decay into disorder and equilibrium.

Every living things on this planet is made of cells. Basically, a cell is a protein-based robot too small to feel or experience anything. It has the properties we just assign to life: it has a wall that separates it from the surroundings, creating order, it regulates itself and maintains a constant state. It eats stuff to stay alive, it grows and develops, it reacts to the environment, and it is subject to evolution.

Let’s pretend that your trash bin is the universe. It started with a few rubbish, and got more and more chaotic over time. By investing energy cleaning up, you can create order and it is as good as new. This is what living things do. But what is life?

In a single cell, every second millions of chemical responses take place, forming a complex symphony. A cell can make thousands of types of protein, some fairly simple, some incredibly complex. Imagine driving a motorcycle at 150 km/h while constantly rebuilding every single part of it with stuff you found on the road. That is what cells do. But no part of the cell is alive, everything is dead stuff moved by the law of the universe.

So is life the combination of all these processes that are taking place? In the end, every living thing will die. The thing of the whole process is to help this by producing new form of entities, and by this, I mean DNA. Life is, in some way, just a lot of stuff that carries genetic information around. Every living thing is a subject to elaboration, and the DNA that develops the stylish living thing around it will stay in the system.

So, is DNA life then? If you take DNA out of its hull, it certainly is a cery complex molecule, but it can not do anything by itself.

This is where virus make everything more complicated. Viruses are strings of RNA or DNA that need cells to do something. Scientists are still debating whether or not if they count as living or dead. There are even viruses that attack dead cells and bring them back to life so they can be a host for them, which blurs the line even more.

Or Mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell and were previously free living bacteria that combined itself with bigger cells. They still have their own DNA and multiply on their own, but they are basically not alive anymore, they are dead. They sacrificed their own life for the survival of their DNA, which means living matters can evolve into dead matters as long as it is beneficial. So, perhaps life is information that manages to continued its existence.

But, what about AI (artificial intelligence)? By the most common definition, we are very close to creating artificial life in computers. It is only a matter of time before our technology gets there. You could also argue that computer viruses are alive.

But the more we learn what AI can do and how life works, the more we get to creating the first machine that fits our description of living things, the more our image of ourselves is in danger. And this will happen sooner or later.

And there is an interesting question: if everything in the universe is made of the same molecule, does this mean everything in the universe is dead or that everything in the universe is alive? That it is just a question of complexity? Is life or death is an irrelevant question and we have not noticed it yet? Afterall, it is thinking about questions like this that makes us feel alive, and gives us some comfort.