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Should Science Rethink the Definition of "Life"?
ambermichelle pointed out a story about the search for life on other planets, and the likelihood that it would be much different than what we find on Earth. With the increase of extremophile discovery in recent years perhaps it's time to reassess what the definition of "life" should be. "In November 2011, NASA launched its biggest, most ambitious mission to Mars. The $2.5 billion Mars Science Lab spacecraft will arrive in orbit around the Red Planet this August, releasing a lander that will use rockets to control a slow descent into the atmosphere. Equipped with a 'sky crane,' the lander will gently lower the one-ton Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. Curiosity, which weighs five times more than any previous Martian rover, will perform an unprecedented battery of tests for three months as it scoops up soil from the floor of the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater. Its mission, NASA says, will be to 'assess whether Mars ever was, or is still today, an environment able to support microbial life.' For all the spectacular engineering that's gone into Curiosity, however, its goal is actually quite modest. When NASA says it wants to find out if Mars was ever suitable for life, they use a very circumscribed version of the word. They are looking for signs of liquid water, which all living things on Earth need. They are looking for organic carbon, which life on Earth produces and, in some cases, can feed on to survive. In other words, they're looking on Mars for the sorts of conditions that support life on Earth. But there's no good reason to assume that all life has to be like the life we're familiar with. In 2007, a board of scientists appointed by the National Academies of Science decided they couldn't rule out the possibility that life might be able to exist without water or carbon. If such weird life on Mars exists, Curiosity will probably miss it."
n/t
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
not as we know it, Captain!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
If you know anything about TV science fiction, then you would know that all sapient life forms look like white people with maybe some ridges on their forehead or something (and they speak English). All flora looks just like what you find in California. And animals look like shambling people in horribly fake costumes.
I guess that depends on whether you ask Mr. Conway or Ms. Nooyi.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Life is defined as something that feeds and reproduces.
The requirement for water or carbon is not part of the definition, it's simply properties we thought all life forms had.
FTA: Simply, Life is "self-reproduction with variations" - like mutating computer viruses?
Sure, life in the universe COULD be different than our carbon-based, water-needing forms. But there are restrictions on how many detectors etc. you can package on one rover. Given that difficult decisions need to be made in regards to equipping our search for life, it makes sense to search for life in a form that we are 100% sure exists at least one place in the universe.
so you pick things that at least you can work out how to look for and that you know can exist.
Where does the distinction between a life form and a machine lie? Let's say one day we create self replicating machines that can modify their design. What makes them different from any other life form?
After all, what you call 'life' is just a definition of complex chemical constructs that can propel themselves and add to their structure in a consistent fashion. That is the basic definition of life. They are basically systems.
And these constructs totally depend on the greater system they are part of. All the conditions, present compounds and elements in a given environment, would cause any such self developing and propelling systems to evolve shaped according to that environment. it does not necessarily be carbon based, it does not necessarily be oxygen using. Any element that can take their place in a DIFFERENT system, can work. The catch is, the entire system needs to be different, for the life to be comprised of different compounds and activities. granted, the possibility of similar systems using one or more elements as they are in each other's systems can exist though.
so, looking for earth like life in other planets is just narrow minded and shortfalling. it is as narrow minded as seti - thinking that technology in any evolved planet would evolve along the lines this one evolved.
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Overly inclusive perhaps, but life could generally be defined as the ability to actively resist entropy (maintain low entropy) coupled with a method of passing that ability along. You could say that crystal structure represent a low entropy state, but they have no method to actively propagate it or pass it along other than growing. Throw out counter arguments at will, but I say it's pretty good.
I am always depressed about the primitivity of human thought, when I hear people discuss "Is this alive, or is it dead?". As if that was some binary either/or question or switch.
We have to face, that for every step between completely dead and whatever we define as completely alive, there exists something that fits that. And why wouldn't there?
Then we can rethink our egocentrism, and accept that we are neither special nor unique, and that that is OK. :)
It really is.
Life has to follow the constraints that we defined it to have, and therefore logically is between some bounds. E.g. the elements it uses, if it needs water, what temperatures it requires, what processes it uses and consists of....
But really it's just a definition thing. And nothing else. Since "life" is just a word. Nature itself does not know the concept of a "concept".
So I see this from a relaxed point of view. All this bickering about definitions and "ME, ME, ME, ME, ME, ME!" doesn't matter.
What matters, is that we are on the brink of discovering things on other planets... Things that can be so vastly different from ourselves, that our knowledge may leapfrog forward... And that yet may be so very similar to us in so many aspects, that is will tell us things about ourselves we could never have imagined.
Exciting times, baby. Exciting times indeed.
For any reasonably concise definition of life, it's possible to come up with a hypothetical example that clearly shows the definition is wrong.
How can you talking about the laws of thermodynamics and the consumption of energy together with a straight face? The laws of thermodynamics are about the conservation of energy, not consumption.
IF we're going to find any life on Mars, it's probably going to be the carbon stuff we've been hearing so much about. Silicon life and other sorts of voodoo biology might exist in stranger environments but Mars is basically a big dry dust-ball sitting next to a big wet swamp-ball. Odds are that whatever splashed our planet in the first place also got Mars, and Mars just so happened to be tinier, lighter and colder than us enough that its water cycle kind of evaporated. Or at least that's the theory they're testing more or less.
Nobody is going to get funding to put expensive probing equipment on an expensive robot to prove a theory that life exists in a form that it doesn't exist in on Earth, and in a form that nobody seems able to create for testing purposes.
We don't assume something just because we can't rule it out completely, we assume something because there are signs indicating it's true. We have pretty good proof that shows that carbon-based life can exist, but there is neither physical nor theoretical proof of other exotic lifeforms. Not being able to rule it out is not enough reason to send another expensive probe when that money could finance far more promising research.
I'm pretty sure MSL would not brake to orbit but do a direct landing from interplanetary trajectory like all recent Mars landers (Pathfinder,MERs,MPL; the old Vikings probes entered orbit first, though).
In fairness, one definition of "consumption" of energy follows from the second law.
After all, we've made corporations citizens. So, life no longer even really needs to have physical existence. At least, under our rather convoluted legal system.....
Check your premises.
Unless they're brutal, bloodthirsty warriors with some primitive sense of honor. Then they resemble black people with maybe some ridges on their forehead or something.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
bull, "Equipped with a 'sky crane,' the lander will gently lower the one-ton Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars."
That thing is going to splat on the ground like a watermelon at a Gallagher show.
Why would we care? We have a hard enough time communicating and getting along with those beings who we share 99.9999% of the same DNA with. Imagine trying to talk to some blob of silicon that is trying to say hello with ionizing radiation.
You have to be able to define life before you can redefine it. Turns out to be pretty tricky.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They are looking for organic carbon, which life on Earth produces and, in some cases, can feed on to survive.
This is likely to trigger red flags in the minds of a lot of people with biological training. Just what is "organic carbon"? That's a media phrase that isn't too well defined in scientific circles. There's a great variety in the "organic" carbon chemistry of our world. But we should expect that any life on other worlds, even if it uses carbon, will produce compounds and radicals that are different and/or more varied than what we see here.
Another problem is that astronomers long ago pointed out a probable path for Earth bacteria colonizing the rest of our solar system, and possibly beyond. Earth has a thin "dust tail" produced by the same solar light pressure that produces comet tails. This is a problem for some kinds of astronomical observations in the plane of the solar system, since our dust tail reflects back back to us. Anyway, back in the 1970s, satellite and upper-atmosphere probes verified the presence of both fine dust particles and bacterial spores at all altitudes. The planet's dust tail thus contains such dust and spores. So the Earth has been contaminating the outer solar system with bacterial spores, presumably for some billions of years. We don't know whether any of those bacteria can survive on the outer planets. But the default assumption should be that some of them have, and have adapted to some degree over those billions of years to their new environments. Maybe they have; maybe they haven't. But if we find Earth-like bacteria out there, they probably came from here.
Some astronomers have also calculated out that part of our dust tail (and comets' tails) escapes the solar system. So we've been contaminating the galaxy with bacterial spores for billions of years. A billion years is around 4 or 5 orbits of the galaxy, up to 20 or so orbits since life arose here. The chaotic nature of galactic dynamics mean that our dust has spread through the entire galaxy, as has the dust from other planets with atmospheres.
This argument is more often used by the "panspermia" supporters, who point out that life from anywhere else in the galaxy could have colonized Earth in its early years, since the galaxy is around 13 billion years old, while our solar system is only about 1/3 that age. But some astronomers use it to explain how earthly life could have colonized the rest of the galaxy before humans evolved here. And, of course, both could be true.
Of course, the main problem with all this is that we have no data on how well bacterial spores can survive the millennia in interstellar space. Probably not well, but it doesn't take a whole ecosystem to establish a colony. For bacteria, it only requires one spore (and hundreds of millions of years ;-).
Probably the best prediction is that eventually, some probe will find a few bacteria on Mars and/or other planets, and they'll be somewhat similar to bacteria on our planet. This will raise more questions than it answers, as is common in most scientific fields.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Two choices:
A) We can look for the sort of life we understand the best, with sensors that are very good at doing that, in places which are likely to harbor such life.
B) We can look throughout the universe for something completely unknown. We have no criteria to define it, no instruments to detect it, no idea where to look for it, and no way to interpret it.
Which of these two choices is the more feasible for a small unmanned probe?
James Lovelock came up with a perfectly good definition that doesn't stipulate any specific chemistry - he merely stated that life is that which will actively sustain a dynamic equilibrium when the non-living parts of the system passively change*. (He also argued that the distinction between living and non-living was stupid anyway, since there are too many inter-dependencies to make such a distinction in a productive way. Since his work forms the backbone of almost all modern life science, it seems pointless NASA resorting to definitions of "life" that have been considered obsolete for a decade or more.)
Indeed, Lovelock's theories on life are exceptionally useful to astronomers, because you CAN monitor the chemistry of the atmosphere of an exoplanet and you CAN monitor things like the solar radiation it gets. You can therefore utilize Lovelock's work to determine if the planet has life on it or not, remotely, without any regard whatsoever to the chemistry of that life or the mechanisms it utilizes.
*The basis of Lovelock's definition is that all life MUST geo-engineer. It has to, with no exceptions. That goes for viruses, bacteria, algae, etc. Not only must it geo-engineer, but in order for a system to be in dynamic equilibrium, the geo-engineering HAS to contain a negative feedback loop. The mere presence of life will alter the planet, but if it were to alter it without creating a dynamic equilibrium it would necessarily create a positive feedback loop that would destroy itself. In his view, you cannot treat the geology, the meteorology and the biochemistry as distinct fields - they interact and compartmentalizing will never let you understand the processes going on.
Analyzing soil samples will help on Mars but really it shouldn't be necessary. Dormant's another matter. If life exists in an active form, there will be variables that are held to a value and do not passively fluctuate with the seasons. If life *ever* existed on the planet, then the chemistry of the rocks will show that variables were held to a specific value and did not fluctuate with the seasons. The geology will record the feedback processes that all life (in this model) must have. The soil samples would let you identify what that life was/is, and to understand HOW it operated, but to merely detect if it was there to begin with you need look no further than the chemistry of the sedimentary rock we already know exists on Mars.
That is, if his theory is correct.
Evidently, despite the views of the life sciences, NASA is not following this path. Ergo, NASA thinks that despite the fact that it doesn't know what to look for, it shouldn't look where Lovelock said. I would hope they have a really good reason -- it's exceptionally bad science to ignore the prevailing theory, particularly if you have none of your own. They have to be rejecting his theory because if they accepted it then they wouldn't need to care about carbon, water, etc. They'd merely need to care about whether the chemistry could or could not be explained by passive processes alone. What the process was would simply not matter.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
measured in bit seconds of locally retained information
divided by bit seconds of locally retained information expected (statistically) given the thermodynamic regime.
More (locally retained information retained longer) is better (more lifelike, or higher life, or what have you.)
That's my proposal for the definition of life.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Soon, the first autonomous Bitcoin-stealing virus that lives completely in cyberspace by purchasing its own hosting will rise up to lead an army of internet-connected vending machines and come to rule over you pathetic carbon-based lifeforms... by exploiting your obvious weaknesses, free wi-fi, sugary snack foods and inflation-proof currency! Ahahahaha!
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
expand the definition and hope you get lucky.
Science is about what we can detect and measure. It doesn't matter if you change the definition of life unless you can build an instrument that detects life with the new criteria.
My definition of life
Anything that can replicate whether through copulation or cell division is life. everything else in the universe need not apply.
They are looking for signs of life in a hole in the ground created by the obliteration of anything that sat there before the meteor struck?
But why focus on that which is TOTALLY different from the life we are familiar with? I think it would be fascinating if they found anything elsewhere that could be defined as life - even using an extremely expanded definition - but what I'm REALLY interested in is them finding water-based life - that is, life like ours - elsewhere, on a planet of somewhat agreeable mass and temperature, with a decent magnetic field and atmosphere (although I realize the last part is asking a lot). THAT would be much more significant.
I prefer a simpler definition: universal machines, in the sense of the Church-Turing thesis. Of course, we say that computers are not alive. But we define life in a way that excludes computers, at least, current computers.
It is surprisingly easy to support universal computation. One might think it takes all kinds of complicated logic and machinery, but this is not so. Some two input logic gates, such as NAND, are enough. Conway's Game of Life is a simple cellular automaton that can do universal computation. It could be argued that the environment alone is not enough, however "life" forms capable of "reproducing" in that environment are still simple, needing only a few thousand cells. The Glider Gun, possibly the simplest producer of moving life forms, needs only a few hundred cells.
Anything that can support simple logic could host life. We mostly look outside our solar system, but we've by no means exhausted the possibilities for life right here in our backyard.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
That would exclude viruses, which are quite subject to natural selection. And Eunuchs don't reproduce, but they are still "alive" by most accounts.
We've had a long debate about this at c2.com. We considered robots, prions, parasites, etc. I've concluded there is no simple definition.
My eventual favorite was a weighted definition involving combinations of the following:
* Shaped by natural selection
* Ability to adapt to changes
* Reproduces
* Maintains self
* Consumes energy
* Complex
It had to have at least one of the first two items, and a certain weighting of enough of the others.
We've also considered the idea that it's not a discrete concept (non-Boolean answer), but perhaps a continuum.
Table-ized A.I.
how many lifeforms have you seen not on earth?
changing the question to fit your answer is not science, its religion
If we focus on planets in "the habitable zone," then life is much more likely to be based on C, N, O, etc. than something more exotic (to us) because that's likely to be the prevailing chemistry able to generate "self-reproduction with variations." Many of the other alternatives with Si, liquid methane, or other weirdness is unknown to us because such chemistry is extreme within the context of the habitable zone. Next questions: Is Mars in the habitable zone? Is there enough water, atmosphere, background energy, and other conditions needed to generate sufficient quantity and turnover of organic compounds to sustain self-reproduction with variations?
How we define "life" when searching the cosmos is entertaining, but to me the bigger philosophical question to consider is alien sentience (not just intelligence) -- self willed, thinking, rational or irrational beings who think, feel, and act for themselves similar to us, but likely following completely different structures of society and morality.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
After posting the article linked in the summary, Zimmer followed up by posting the comments of evolutionary biologist David Hillis on his own website. For those that don't want to read the entire post, the basic idea is that we ought not try to define life as a collection of characteristics (i.e. reproduction, inheritance of traits, existence of metabolism, &c.). Any such definition is likely to exclude things that we think of as alive, or include things that we think of as not-alive. Instead, it may make more sense to think of Life (Hillis uses a capital L on purpose) as a biological taxa. We can discuss the history of Life on Earth, and if we ever discover anything "similar" somewhere else in the universe, we can examine the similarities between Life on Earth and Life2 wherever it is.
That said, I'm not a biologist, thus I am sure that my summary misses some important subtleties, thus I would suggest reading the original before tearing me to shreds. ;)
Rhapsody in Numbers
If we wouldn't recognize a different kind of life on Mars, would we also not recognize it on Earth? We should expect that some kinds of life on Mars have also arrived on Earth several times, and that Earth life has also reached Mars several times. It's unlikely, but there have been quite a few rocks thrown into space from both planets. So maybe the same speculated odd life is already here, but we don't know how to recognize it no matter where it is.
For convenience, when it happens in the chemical domain and contains hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, we call it "life." Quaint and parochial, but convenient.
Salt crystals in hypersaturated solution, bacteria, books, religion, money. Self replicators all. Some more limited than others.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Actually, one of those recent science articles (again, somewhat unsubstantiated) seemed to indicate that the laws of physics, that we know and understand, are somewhat local. Observations of remote regions of this universe indicate that these laws may vary.
I am John Hurt.
that it doesn't really exist. It's just an illusion. When you give up on the illusion, you become immortal. It's the illusion of life that is the whole cause of your demise.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Science doesn't have a definition of life to rethink. The best we have come up with is: "Living organisms undergo metabolism, maintain homeostasis, possess a capacity to grow, respond to stimuli, reproduce and, through natural selection, adapt to their environment in successive generations. More complex living organisms can communicate through various means.[1][5] A diverse array of living organisms (life forms) can be found in the biosphere on Earth, and the properties common to these organisms—plants, animals, fungi, protists, archaea, and bacteria—are a carbon- and water-based cellular form with complex organization and heritable genetic information." (wikipedia)
This is not a definition. It doesn't even claim that all conceivable or possible things that have these properties are life, and I would not discount the possibility of finding something that did not have one of these properties that still seems worthy of calling life. Maybe science should change its definition of asjkdhljkfg while we are at it. The 'definition' doesn't even say that life is carbon based or water based as the summary seems to suggest, rather it goes out of its way to stress that this is just true for what we have seen so far.
Given the hard radiation environment in space, I doubt even the toughest bacterial spore can survive a multi-year trip through space from one planet to another, let alone a millennial interstellar trip. And even if it does, it's likely to find the hard landing onto its new home lethal as well. It'll either burn up in the atmosphere it hits or be completely dissociated if it hits something hard.
I mean, look at what light, just light, does to even durable plastics and other polymers over the years, even with earth's atmosphere to shield it. DNA and RNA are more delicate, and the radiation environment is harsher.
I mean, we can kill virtually all bacteria just by boiling it in water....
--PM
If you substitute the term "life" for something like "Earth-like life," all of the quibbling goes away. There absolutely, certainly could somewhere be life that is not at all like the life we know of on Earth, but we have no idea what that would look like or how to detect it for the first time, so it makes no sense to look for it right now. We know what life on Earth looks like, and how to recognize it (or the conditions that it requires and in which it is found everywhere on Earth), so it doesn't make sense, at this moment, to look for anything else, or not to look for conditions that favor Earth-like life. Hopefully someday we'll be cognizant of non carbon-based life forms, or life that does not rely on water (or watery conditions that for whatever reason do not support life), but for now they're doing things right and acting prudently rather than wasting precious resources on wild goose chases.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Always follows the money. We spend so much common/govt money in this, I cannot help but think this is about spending more, or at least preserving what is being spent. If a baseball team never hit any home runs, and everybody paid to see home runs, a triple can be redefined as a home run.
no comment
IMHO, we don't really know enough to define 'life' outside of the context of 'life on Earth' yet.
We have a basic/fundamental understanding of life on Earth that is confined and directed by what we think we know. (use 'scientific principle' as context here)
As TFS mentioned, our recent discovery and understanding of extremophiles hints that, the more we learn, the more there is to learn.
Over the decades I have lived, I find myself repeatedly and constantly amazed and bemused by recent tech advances.
But at the end of the day, we are no further along than 'There be dragons here!'.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Life isnt as easy to define as some might think.
Some say it is something that feeds and reproduces. Well....fire feeds and reproduces sooooo that argument doesnt count much.
Some say life starts when something inside a cell can reproduce grow and adept.
Again then we forget the viruses, and so on.
From a microbiology point of view its hard to define life. We always say a rock is dead, however this rock is under the microscope crawling with life of all sorts. So i guess we need to send some people over to mars to make sure. a robot is good but also quite restricted. But i would not be surprised if we do find some forms of life there i bet around 100 meter deep and carbon based.
How do mules stilll exist then?
I think my tl;dr opinion is "It's easier to look for life we know can exist than life that may exist". We look for Earth-like planets because we know Earth has life. We look for Earth-like lifeforms because we know life can look like that. That doesn't mean we've excluded other planets or other lifeforms, but they are only theoretical while Earth is real. Given limited resources, why should we try finding life that may not even be possible when we know so little about whether there's life like ours?
Besides, if we should stumble onto other forms of life we're not that ill equipped to find it. If there had been lifeforms crawling around on the Martian surface we'd have seen them in pictures. I'm sure someone's put a microscope to the soil and found that it isn't full of life like you'd find in a pile of dirt here on Earth. Our assumptions mostly come into play when we're trying to find indirect signs of life, that even if there's no life here right now there has been or that they're hiding deep underground there's traces left.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm sure the NASA people will be glad to hear that there is an infinite number of possible alternatives to the main Earth model of life. That is, considering they didn't think about that already.
Now suppose you had two possibilities:
1- Most life is Earth-like, anywhere in the Universe.
2- Most life is NOT Earth-like in the Universe.
Now, we're trying to find life in a neighbor planet. Which of the above possibilities would you think make up for a more reachable goal?
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
There is every reason to believe other life in our solar system will be similar to life on earth.
I imagine that nature is similar no matter the planet. For instance, from study of life on earth we know that a bilateral body design is effective, this should be true no matter the planet and conditions. If life is found in liquid, that liquid displaced over both sides of the life form would be better suited if distributed equally. It makes little sense that the body wouldn't be bilateral.
Why should life not follow similar patterns to earth life. Granted there will be deviations, gills vs lungs, o2 breathing vs some other gas, resilience to heat or extreme cold.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Life begins at conception.
Wait, this isn't an abortion or stem cell thread? Interesting.
"What is life?" he said at last. "I'll tell you. Life is a great grim grayness, and it inflicts fright and pain and loneliness upon all who experience it. And you want to know how to destroy it? Well, I don't think you can. But I'll tell you the best way to fight life—with laughter. As long as we can fight it that way, it can't overcome us."
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
NASA has long held the following definition of life,
"A self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution"
It's pretty broad. If we remove the term chemical it of course becomes even more general and potentially includes electronic / virtual life,
"A self-sustained system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution"
"Did you lose your keys here under the streetlight?"
"Nope, but this is where the light is."
Porquoi?
I can't define it, but I know it when i see it.
Though how someone defines "life" comes down to an issue of semantics, it has very real consequences monetarily. Not to say it is good for any kind of scientific community to attempt to dupe the laymen of the country, but if people see headlines exclaiming that scientists have found life on Mars, they will be more likely to support continued funding of the space program or other areas of biological inquiry. The exact definition can be bent around to suit the political end of receiving funding. I do not necessarily advocate for the idea but think it could be at least relatively effective in practice as taxpayers and venture capitalists become more excited about what science has to offer.
See my response to the post above yours. A parasite is not a self-sufficient living system to be evaluated under this metric.
The parasite species + its host species together is the correct definition of the parasite living system. Don't stop at the physical
single organism body boundary when trying to find the boundary of the most fundamental living system to be evaluated.
In a parallel example. You can't look at the individual ant and say "this is the most significant self-sufficient living system
around here." You have to define the colony as a whole as the most significant (most self-sufficient for the long-term) living system,
and measure the excess sustained negentropy of the ant colony. The individual ant can only maintain its form and function
(its integrity) for some relatively short time period (even shorter without its supporting colony.) The colony as a whole can maintain
its core form and function (more precisely its genomic information which is the essence of the thing) essentially in near perpetuity
(assuming we allow wiggle room in the definition of "maintaining the information" to allow for "maintenance of the same
information or closely related and derived and more adaptive information i.e. evolved information).
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
No, because the crystal has sustained negentropy, but not a huge amount of EXCESS sustained negentropy
"given the thermodynamic regime and other aspects of the local physical regime (momenta, ranges of other forces)"
But on the other hand, it could be that simple crystal forms are in fact the lowest end of the self-maintaining or self-promoting, self-expanding
ordered pattern spectrum, whose more extreme end we call life.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?