Drinking a lot can age you, as your body just churns through the cells that are being killed off and needing replaced.

Interesting. One thing about life is that we see many different shades of it because of a need or an exploit that was found millions of years ago.

Quickly: Water doesn’t replicate, and the other two are non-physical and would not fit the standard definition for life prior to the last two centuries.

But new definitions are opening up. If we know one thing about life is that it always finds away. -Jurassic Park

I’m just saying they don’t replicate on their own, this is a requirement for life.

A car is autonomous and today they don’t replicate. They show signs of life however in different ways, but a true life form has a code that allows for procreation.

This opens up the definition of life, only available to us last century as the first time in billions of years.

The idea that something that has no mass (minimal mass, exists as electrons) but requires a computing structure, could be life.

Is that equivalent to humans! The only difference between a dead human and one that is alive is electricity, and proper chemical functions and a computing structure.

From this point on our civilization will redefine life as it finds new versions of it beyond our planet.

Viruses and spores are similar in that they move to provoke replication. But a spores goal (ones seeking replication) will move to produce not more spores but a lifeform that is bigger than itself. A virus generally is replicating itself millions of times with no larger structures in mind. Spores that protect and fight can have similar outcomes to destructive viruses.

With viruses, for myself: The replication environment would be the cell, the cell is the food.

This and your argument are interesting ways of looking at it.

Red blood cells are tools of sorts formed from another structure, inside the bone marrow. There is a lot in common.

For myself this wouldn’t fit a version of independent life, but the cells are alive.

This is where the debate has some gray areas.

I was trying to imagine an odd life-form that could be one that could theoretically span the life of the universe for some mental gymnastics.

And this is where things start to get weird for myself in my own conclusions. But humans are weird, and fun. So I go.

The life-form would have to be present today, somewhere in space time.

It would have to be physical because of my own requirements.

From our perspective and in my opinion it’s time would pass orders of magnitude more slowly than ours and therefore would not change much.

Something I kind of liked to fathom — of the oldest things we know: are rocks. They will outlast the stars, our planet and technically our version of life. They aren’t biological, but for me it allows my mind to not be as rigid about what life maybe should we begin leaving earth as a species.

If I was to develop something that would be able to last trillions of years based on research, it would be a life form that would have a lot in common with a rock, it would be interesting to see if we can survive into the next big bang, something that may or may not have ever been done before.

In todays definition, I imagine life to be a physically cohesive structure that can have a taxonomic genus. This involves chemical processes that include procreation, self-preservation, a successful way for surviving an environment. Now this definition is for everything before this century, with billions of years of biological “robots”. An unfathomable amount of time we can’t comprehend, yet in some very distant ways we can make sense and find common ground on why the first cells did what they did.

Going forward into our time now, we can open up the ideas of life a bit broader. It’s an artists paintbrush from here as we begin to closely replicate consciousness and sentience, with the other aspects of life following.

It is the case usually on earth that talking about a new species doesn’t preclude that for one species to necessarily live all others have to die. The answer has been always a foundation of coexistence with some that win more than others.

For myself calling a company a life form only fits aspects of a neural network making itself smarter or worse, but a company is a macro life-form at best, where you can remove parts within itself and they can survive on their own. This is equivalent to a family of life forms which is a popular structure in nature. When you are together, you can be more powerful than the individual.

“Is my hand alive” sort of approach is often a debate.

I think a standard definition of life is one that can be self-sustaining and when needed can get energy by surviving off of the environment it is in, and given a choice can use that environment to replicate.

For myself a virus is something that can force dormancy, like frogs and bacteria that can freeze in their own way.

Most life forms afterwards live on to grow or bud in their own way.

Viruses for myself are life but a very specialized one that only utilizes the minimum energy required.