The Difference Between Life and Alive

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I favor trying to think about chemistry from an informational perspective and thinking about chemistry as a substrate of information. I can think about the physics of life at any scale of biology but the thing that's nice about chemistry is it's like the base level of biological reality so it's the easiest to see the physics clearly. So when I talk about you know like biology creates or are you biology uses information to construct things that couldn't exist otherwise without in the absence of information? It's not like life can potentially manipulate any scale of physical reality but it emerges in chemistry, he says. We're just separated what we're looking at from the simulation from its physical implementation according to Dr. Michael Lockman

We are all alive, but “life” is something we struggle to understand. How do we distinguish a “living organism” from an emergent dynamical system like a hurricane, or a resource-consuming chemical reaction like a forest fire, or an information-processing system like a laptop computer? There is probably no one crisp set of criteria that delineates life from non-life, but it’s worth the exercise to think about what we really mean, especially as the quest to find life outside the confines of the Earth picks up steam. Sara Imari Walker planned to become a cosmologist before shifting her focus to astrobiology, and is now a leading researcher on the origin and nature of life. We talk about what life is and how to find it, with a special focus on the role played by information and computation in living beings.

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Sara Imari Walker received her Ph.D. in physics from Dartmouth college. She is currently Associate Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, and Associate Director of the ASU-Santa Fe Institute Center for Biosocial Complex Systems. She is the co-founder of the astrobiology social network SAGANet, and serves on the Board of Directors for Blue Marble Space.

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