• Question: What is Life?

    Asked by J-DIZZLE to Adrian, Gaia, Jim, Scott, Vicky on 5 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Gaia Andreoletti

      Gaia Andreoletti answered on 5 Mar 2016:

      In my opinion, life is what makes possible to discriminate all living things (humans, animals, plants etc..) from not alive things (such as rocks, pens, pencils etc..).

    • Photo: Adrian Buzatu

      Adrian Buzatu answered on 6 Mar 2016:

      That is a good questions! There is no clear answer even in science and philosophy. First we should clarify we talk about life as we know it. There may be life out there in the Universe so different we would not even recognise it as being alive. Life as we know it means the organism abosorbes water (drinks), nutrients (eats), oxigen (breathes), burns the nutrients in oxygen (metabolism), eliminates waste as CO2 (breathes), urine, excrements. From this process it grows and then at some point reproduces. Life as we know it is built upon carbon, and mostly uses oxygen.

    • Photo: Scott Lawrie

      Scott Lawrie answered on 7 Mar 2016:

      Life is a way to describe something that grows, reproduces, performs various functions (like digestion) and does a wide variety of things before dying. Is fire alive? It grows bigger, spreads and reproduces and dies out if it uses up its fuel. However it is just a chemical reaction that happens to give off light and heat. There is no ‘thing’ there that you can touch or weigh. There is no organisation, like there is in a cell’s nucleus. Fire cannot find its own source of fuel, like even simple bacteria can. Therefore fire is not alive. Hopefully that gives you an idea of what ‘life’ is.

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