What Is Life?
What Is Life? What Is the Essence of Being Alive?
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, and 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.
Life is 'a process', he says...
There. He said it, and we agree. Life is not an 'it'... a fish in this case. Life is about a process, change, we're talking relationships ... an ellipsis and ellipses ... Lifecycles ...
It's All Related ... and it's moving ... we're thinking about perspective now.
We listen more attentively now to the scientist.
Thanks Eric Smith of the Santa Fe Institute --
Eric... has sought 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.
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 ...
Genesis...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God
From 'Heaven', from 'the Stars Above'
* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Origins_of_Life
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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/*
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Episode 1. Carlos Mariscal: What Do We Mean When We Ask, “What Is Life?”
- https://web.archive.org/web/20221205171158/https://whatislife.libsyn.com/episode-1-carlos-mariscal-what-do-we-mean-when-we-ask-what-is-life (see Web.Archive.org)
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?
- http://whatislife.libsyn.com/-episode-2-sara-walker-if-we-find-alien-life-will-we-even-know-it (see Web.Archive.org)
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
- http://whatislife.libsyn.com/-episode-3-jim-cleaves-the-origin-of-life-from-frankenstein-to-a-laboratory-spark (see Web.Archive.org)
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?
- http://whatislife.libsyn.com/episode-4-caleb-scharf-how-did-life-begin (see Web.Archive.org)
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.
Episode 5. Jeremy England: Why Does Life Exist?
- http://whatislife.libsyn.com/episode-5-jeremy-england-why-does-life-exist (see Web.Archive.org)
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.
Article about Dr. England in Quanta.
Episode 6. Steven Benner: How Weird Can Life Get?
- http://whatislife.libsyn.com/episode-6-steven-benner-how-weird-can-life-get (see Web.Archive.org)
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?
- http://whatislife.libsyn.com/episode-7-donato-giovannelli-warm-ponds-or-hellish-ventswhere-did-life-begin (see Web.Archive.org)
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.
Episode 8. Kate Adamala: Can We Make Life?
- http://whatislife.libsyn.com/episode-8-kate-adamala-can-we-make-life (see Web.Archive.org)
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”
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