Top Document: [sci.astro] ET Life (Astronomy Frequently Asked Questions) (6/9) Previous Document: F.00 Extraterrestrial Life Next Document: F.02 Life in the Solar System See reader questions & answers on this topic! - Help others by sharing your knowledge This material is extracted from the review article by Chyba & MaDonald (1995, Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Science). How might we tell if a future mission to another body in the solar system had discovered life? How do we separate living from non-living? A simple set of criteria for doing so might be, Something that is alive must (1) acquire nutrients from its environment, (2) respond to stimuli in its environment, and (3) reproduce. Unfortunately, with this definition we would conclude that mules are not alive while fire is. Other attempts to define life---based on genetic, chemical, or thermodynamic criteria---suffer from similar failings. A working definition used by many attempting to understand the origin of life on the Earth is something like, "Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution." (Note that this definition, *chemical* systems, would exclude computer life or A-life, but other definitions exist which would not.) Again this definition is not without its difficulties. The emphasis on evolving systems implicitly assumes a collection of entities; Victor Frankenstein's creation would not have been classified as alive. Further, how long must one wait before concluding that a system was not evolving? A recent definition that focusses on individual entities is that a living organism must be (1) self-bounded, (2) self-generating, and (3) self-perpetuating. Perhaps it is not possible to provide necessary and sufficient criteria to distinguish "alive" from "not alive." Indeed, if life can arise from natural physical and chemical processes, there may be a continuous spectrum of "aliveness," with some entities clearly "alive"---humans, trees, dogs---some entities clearly "not alive"---rocks, pop bottles---and some entities somewhere in between---viruses. Operationally, at our current stage of exploration of the solar system, all of the above definitions are probably too detailed. On Earth, we have entities we clearly identify as "alive." Liquid water appears to be a requirement for these living things. Hence, the focus in solar system studies of life has been to target those bodies where liquid water either is possibly now or may have once been present. User Contributions:Top Document: [sci.astro] ET Life (Astronomy Frequently Asked Questions) (6/9) Previous Document: F.00 Extraterrestrial Life Next Document: F.02 Life in the Solar System Part0 - Part1 - Part2 - Part3 - Part4 - Part5 - Part6 - Part7 - Part8 - Single Page [ Usenet FAQs | Web FAQs | Documents | RFC Index ] Send corrections/additions to the FAQ Maintainer: jlazio@patriot.net
Last Update March 27 2014 @ 02:11 PM
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