Letter to Ansh — 14: What is life?
Dear Ansh
It is 20 March 2020 and Covid-19 pandemic is raging around the world. I am concerned for your and your mums safety, you are still in Ahmedabad and chances are you will be stranded there for some time now.
Most international travel has ground to an halt and countries are pulling up their drawbridges.
The disease itself is probably not that fatal, but it is fatal enough and extremely infectious to be sufficiently worried about.
Do you know the disease is caused by a virus which is technically not a living thing?
Viruses are not considered to be alive.
That does open up an interesting question, what does it mean to be alive? What is life?
Note that I do not intend to take this letter along metaphysical lines.
I have no proof of about whether soul exists, no idea about whether or not there is an afterlife or not (as portrayed in popular culture).
From what I can deduce empirically the answer to both of the questions is most likely a no but again this letter is not about them.
It is about cold facts, which can be observed and verified.
So what is alive?
That is actually a very hard question, we know something is alive when we see it, but what does it actually mean?
Lets start with a simpler question, what is not alive or what is dead?
What happens when you are dead? Your body does not function as intended, it decomposes and withers away. It is unable to maintain its intended state. It is unable to preserve itself actively.
So one of the first criteria to be deemed as being alive is that the entity preserves itself. It takes energy in and uses that to maintain a form that would not be normally possible.
All things that are alive maintain an imbalance against natural forces. They are doing things that go against the typical physical laws. They maintain a state of energy that is not possible to maintain by entities that are typically not alive.
They have energy inside them that they use to maintain their current form and self preserve.
You would say a rock or a hunk of metal maintains its form quite well, does that mean it is alive? The answer to it is no. They do not do anything actively to self preserve, and any energy that is stored in them is the default atomic level and not more.
So is a battery alive? It takes in energy?
Is a balloon alive? It maintains a physical form that is not possible by default per natural laws.
Again the answer is no, while the battery and the balloon store energy neither of them sourced that energy for themselves. Something else inserted that in them. They are nothing more than containers.
So the second criteria for being alive is you have to source your own energy yourself. If you are dependent on someone or something else to provide it to you, then nothing much separates you from things that have no life in them.
Independent, self directed self preservation is one of the key signatures of being alive.
But life has one more key attribute, it self propagates.
We have children and our children have children. Life self propagates.
Note that this is not a compulsory attribute, as there are a number of people who choose to or cannot have children. They are alive perfectly well.
However we are defining life here as a species and not at an individual level.
We have the ability to have children ourselves who are made in our own image. We multiply ourselves.
A virus on the other hand is a parasite. It does not take in energy and the way it self preserves is to hijack someone else’s cells to create copies of itself.
It does not have the ability to self preserve and self replicate which are the key requirements of being alive.
If left to its own devices and disallowed contact with other living organisms, a virus will wither away. It cannot stand alone.
Which is one of the key reasons why social distancing is so important in light of the current pandemic. It is viral and not bacterial, it cannot survive on its own.
I sincerely hope that the virus dies down soon enough and you are back here in Melbourne and in my arms.
Your loving father
Moresh
