Before searching for Extra Terrestrial Life we ought to define what is exactly meant by Life in general, be it ET or terrestrial. I agree that my statement may sound pretty lunatic when it comes to life of planet Earth. We believe that we have clearly defined Carbon based life forms whereas everything else is regarded as non-life. This is greatly thanks to the common root (presumably) from which the life on Earth evolved. Unfortunately, the life elsewhere will take its own paths from its own roots (can be multiple roots too).
Hence we need to define life in more abstract and generic way in order to detect it elsewhere. At this point we have to recognize the most critical fundamentals of life on earth. I think there are only few elementary features that made life sustainable on earth. Let's generalize them.
1. Ability to multiply its own structure (be it chemical of any other). 2. Ability to apply mutations to the new generation at the correct extent - i.e. mutations strong enough to adapt to the rates of environmental transformations, yet subtle enough to retain the basic properties of the original.
In my opinion, any"thing" with above two features would sustain and develop into what can be called life. When I stated any"thing" I did not limit myself to amino acid, big molecules, any particular element such as carbon, or not even to matter itself. It can be any combination of "thing"s that exist in the universe. (Even in virtual universes such as cyber space - but let's leave that part for AI rights groups whenever they start appearing)
Self reproduction which I mentioned as fact (1) above, is a fundamental that appear in many processes. Sometimes the reproduction happens with mutations also. However, none of them match the exact speeds of the change of environment as the early amino acid or DNA did. Hence such procedures do not sustain for longer periods such that they become something that we can call Life.
On this basis we can state that all the other features which we consider as essential for life are just macro-scale composite features that are results of above two basics. And they're just taken (for granted) from the life of Earth. Unfortunately, these by-products can be completely different elsewhere.
With right dignity to all the religious and meta-physical ideologies, let me leave aside the concept that something lives inside the chemical bodies of living beings. The belief of soul/athmaya/vingnanaya(as in Buddhist philosophy) are beyond our ability to measure or debate. For that very reason it's not a good classifier for detecting life. If souls/vingnanaya drives humans and animals, what makes you think that trees, rivers and mountains don't have souls/vingnanaya?? We can not detect life based on something that is not detectable by ourselves.
However it's compelling to accept that every activity that living beings manage, do not ESSENTIALLY need any such driving phenomena, but can be explained purely based on underline chemistry of of DNA and other building blocks of life. It's like AI where small deterministic programs get together in such a complex way to pretend as if they can think and decide.
There is another major question on life and non-life. That is the matter of reaction speed of the species. Imagine that there lives a life form which takes one million earth years to produce offspring. The sluggish beings do their "day-today" actions in the durations of thousands of earth years. They are immovable and "dead as rocks" for the time span of a human life. Will humans detect it as life?? And then imagine an alien species who works so fast that so many generations pass through within a period of a mere milliseconds (don't expect them to have material bodies btw) They may build civilizations which lasts for less than a second. Can we detect them?
Now this story does not have to be Extra Terrestrial. The reaction time difference can make us re-define many natural processes of our own planet as life, if we take it that way. For some time, I've
Slashdot Mirror
Before searching for Extra Terrestrial Life we ought to define what is exactly meant by Life in general, be it ET or terrestrial. I agree that my statement may sound pretty lunatic when it comes to life of planet Earth. We believe that we have clearly defined Carbon based life forms whereas everything else is regarded as non-life. This is greatly thanks to the common root (presumably) from which the life on Earth evolved. Unfortunately, the life elsewhere will take its own paths from its own roots (can be multiple roots too).
Hence we need to define life in more abstract and generic way in order to detect it elsewhere. At this point we have to recognize the most critical fundamentals of life on earth. I think there are only few elementary features that made life sustainable on earth. Let's generalize them.
1. Ability to multiply its own structure (be it chemical of any other).
2. Ability to apply mutations to the new generation at the correct extent - i.e. mutations strong enough to adapt to the rates of environmental transformations, yet subtle enough to retain the basic properties of the original.
In my opinion, any"thing" with above two features would sustain and develop into what can be called life. When I stated any"thing" I did not limit myself to amino acid, big molecules, any particular element such as carbon, or not even to matter itself. It can be any combination of "thing"s that exist in the universe. (Even in virtual universes such as cyber space - but let's leave that part for AI rights groups whenever they start appearing)
Self reproduction which I mentioned as fact (1) above, is a fundamental that appear in many processes. Sometimes the reproduction happens with mutations also. However, none of them match the exact speeds of the change of environment as the early amino acid or DNA did. Hence such procedures do not sustain for longer periods such that they become something that we can call Life.
On this basis we can state that all the other features which we consider as essential for life are just macro-scale composite features that are results of above two basics. And they're just taken (for granted) from the life of Earth. Unfortunately, these by-products can be completely different elsewhere.
With right dignity to all the religious and meta-physical ideologies, let me leave aside the concept that something lives inside the chemical bodies of living beings. The belief of soul/athmaya/vingnanaya(as in Buddhist philosophy) are beyond our ability to measure or debate. For that very reason it's not a good classifier for detecting life. If souls/vingnanaya drives humans and animals, what makes you think that trees, rivers and mountains don't have souls/vingnanaya?? We can not detect life based on something that is not detectable by ourselves.
However it's compelling to accept that every activity that living beings manage, do not ESSENTIALLY need any such driving phenomena, but can be explained purely based on underline chemistry of of DNA and other building blocks of life. It's like AI where small deterministic programs get together in such a complex way to pretend as if they can think and decide.
There is another major question on life and non-life. That is the matter of reaction speed of the species. Imagine that there lives a life form which takes one million earth years to produce offspring. The sluggish beings do their "day-today" actions in the durations of thousands of earth years. They are immovable and "dead as rocks" for the time span of a human life. Will humans detect it as life?? And then imagine an alien species who works so fast that so many generations pass through within a period of a mere milliseconds (don't expect them to have material bodies btw) They may build civilizations which lasts for less than a second. Can we detect them?
Now this story does not have to be Extra Terrestrial. The reaction time difference can make us re-define many natural processes of our own planet as life, if we take it that way. For some time, I've