What Is Life?

From Green Policy
Jump to navigation Jump to search


Hubble crab nebula.jpg


Origins of Life


What Is Life? What Is the Essence of Being Alive?


Life Goes On.jpg


Let's look.

GreenPolicy360: Start at the Santa Fe Institute. Up there in the Sangre de Cristo mountains above the old adobe city of Santa Fe is a world-famed institute housing a jangle of world-wise scientific experts. One of the questions being seriously asked and pursued centers around 'What is life?'.

So, we identify a life-science physicist, Eric Smith, and hypothetically ask them -- "What is life?"

Then, we step away, and listen... almost immediately we recognize a type of 'happiness' as the scientist's answer involves the raison d'etre of the scientist's professional life as a thinker...

The tossed hair scientist first explains what life is not, as an introduction to what life is, and life is not 'a thing' he says. He mentions an ancient Greek philosopher, then another, espouses their thoughts about a living and a dead fish, and concludes that life is not about 'things'.

We follow along.

Evolution ➡️ Evolutionary Ecology ➡️ Life History Theory ➡️ Natural Selection

Ecology ➡️ Community ➡️ Ecosystem ➡️ Biosphere


Life is 'a process', naturally...

There. We agree.


A Biosphere in this case...


There are other cases of 'life yet to be defined' (Exoplanets as ecoplanets is a thought. Perhaps consider a different direction, carbon life-forms vs. silicon chips, an artificially designed 'neural network' Being or perhaps a 'heuristic algorithmic language' Character ala a 'HAL 9000' lab-creation, or go further into sci-fi, a yet unimagined 'Star Stuff' amalgam, an energetic 'Blob', or Star Trek-like 'Borg' Creature that appears from another realm to merge with you...)

Our point is, as we listen to a famed scientist who studies 'What is life?', yes, life can be different than as defined in a context of our 'Earthy' understandings.

Life does not necessarily have to be an 'it' in an Earth-centric Biosphere, a species, a molecule, a microorganism, a fungi network, or a something in a flesh and blood category, or tiny little blue-green phytoplankton swarms swimming around in oceans and creating worldwide life-enabling oxygen, or any fish in this case per Eric.

Life can be about a process, we're talking relationships ... an ellipsis and ellipses ... cognition ... intent ... survival instinct ... lifecycles of change and exchange ... Earth-bound or beyond-Earth.


Think of life as relationships ...

It's All Related ... and it's moving ... we're thinking about perspective now.


We listen more attentively to the scientist.


Thanks Eric Smith of the Santa Fe Institute --


Eric... is seeking to understand the origin of life as a planetary process, particularly the interplay of chance and necessity that generated the systems of metabolism, the rise of molecular hierarchy and folded macromolecules, and the choreography that coalesces objects and events into individuals and their reproductive lifecycles.

Got it?


Living Earth.png


Now onward .... thinking of living systems, ecosystems, biospheres, evolution ...

Our thoughts and thinking go to spirit and science... and deep origins of life and beyond ...


Creation-of.jpg

Genesis...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God


From 'Heaven', from 'the Stars Above'

* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Origins_of_Life


____________________________________________________


Going Green, Going Live


A series of live conversations / Podcasts between a writer Carl Zimmer and eight leading thinkers on the question of what it means to be alive.

What Is Life? was recorded at Caveat in New York City


'What is Life?' Episodes Accessible via Internet Web.Archive / Wayback Machine

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://whatislife.libsyn.com/*



____________________________________________________


Episode 1. Carlos Mariscal: What Do We Mean When We Ask, “What Is Life?”


Carlos Mariscal is a philosopher at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. He collaborates with evolutionary biologists and astrobiologists to explore what it means to be alive. When we ask what is life, Mariscal suggests, we may be asking the wrong question.

“Life and Only Life: A Radical Alternative to Life Definitionism.” Synthese 2018. Mariscal’s research page.


Episode 2. Sara Walker: If We Find Alien Life, Will We Even Know It?


Sara Imari Walker is a physicist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University. She studies life as a physical phenomenon, in order to develop new ways to search for it elsewhere in the universe. We shouldn’t assume that aliens will introduce themselves to us, so we need a way to recognize life no matter what form it takes.


Episode 3. Jim Cleaves: The Origin of Life, from Frankenstein to a Laboratory Spark


H. James Cleaves, a professor at the Earth-Life Science Institute in Tokyo and co-author of A Brief History of Creation: Science and the Search for the Origin of Life, speaks of the origins of life.

Co-author of A Brief History of Creation: Science and the Search for the Origin of Life


Episode 4. Caleb Scharf: How Did Life Begin?

Caleb Scharf explains that we don’t know how life got its start. But as more evidence emerges, a few theories are emerging as leading contenders. Scharf is the director of the Columbia Astrobiology Center at Columbia University.

calebscharf.com


Episode 5. Jeremy England: Why Does Life Exist?


Jeremy England, a physicist at MIT, talks about why life exists. He has developed an influential theory of life as a way for matter to dissipate energy.

England’s MIT lab site

Article about Dr. England in Quanta.


Episode 6. Steven Benner: How Weird Can Life Get?


Steven Benner, a scientist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, talks about how strange life can get. All the life we know is the same: carbon-based, with DNA for genes. (Okay, except for RNA viruses.) But Benner says we should remain open to the possibility that life elsewhere is very, very weird.

Benner / New York Times article


Episode 7. Donato Giovannelli: Warm Ponds Or Hellish Vents–Where Did Life Begin?


Donato Giovannelli is an assistant professor at the University of Naples “Federico II.” He travels to acid lakes and other extreme environments that are the closest thing today to what Earth was like when life began.

Giovannelli on Twitter


Episode 8. Kate Adamala: Can We Make Life?


Kate Adamala is a chemist at the University of Minnesota. In her Protobiology Lab, she is trying to build a synthetic cell from scratch.

Adamala’s TEDx 'Ancient Earth' talk, “Life But Not Alive”


○

Retrieved from "https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=What_Is_Life%3F&oldid=138336"