What IsLife?

You've been alive your whole life. Has anyone ever told you what that actually means?

Nobody told me. Not in my life sciences biology degree at Ottawa University. Not in nursing school at the University of Saint Mary.

I learned the textbook list. Living things grow, eat, breathe, reproduce, and respond. Then I went to work at the bedside.

On a hematology and oncology floor, I cared for patients whose own cells refused to stop growing. In pediatric kidney and liver transplant, I watched an organ leave one body and start working in another. Cold storage slowed it down so it could survive the trip.

So when exactly is something alive? When it moves? When it copies itself? When it has a pulse?

That question has pulled physicists, chemists, NASA, and synthetic biologists into the same room for 80 years. Here's what they found, in plain words.

If fire can eat, breathe, and grow, is fire alive?

Most of us learned life as a checklist. Fire passes almost all of it.

It consumes fuel. It needs oxygen. It grows. It spreads by throwing sparks that start new fires. It even responds to wind.

Now take a mule. A mule can't reproduce. It fails the list. Yet nobody would call a mule dead.

That's the problem with lists. They describe what life does. They don't explain why it happens.

Scientists needed a deeper rule. One that would work on Earth, in a lab dish, and on a frozen moon of Jupiter. So they went all the way down, to physics.

How does anything stay organized in a universe that keeps falling apart?

Physics has a rule called the second law of thermodynamics. Left alone, everything drifts toward disorder. Hot coffee cools. Sandcastles slump. Buildings crumble.

Life looks like it breaks that rule. You are trillions of cells held in precise order, and you have kept that order for decades.

In 1944, physicist Erwin Schrödinger asked how. His answer came in a short book called What Is Life?

"What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy."Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? (1944)

Here's the plain version. You take in order, like the chemical energy packed into food. You give back disorder, mostly as heat. You don't break the second law. You speed it up around you so you can stay organized inside.

That's why your body gives off heat even while you sleep.

Schrödinger made a second prediction. He guessed that heredity had to be stored in an "aperiodic crystal." That means a stable molecule whose pattern doesn't repeat, so it can carry a message. Nine years later, Watson and Crick described the structure of DNA. Watson credited Schrödinger's book with pulling him toward the gene.

The frontier idea

MIT physicist Jeremy England pushed this further with a theory called dissipative adaptation. His math and computer simulations suggest that matter hit by a steady energy source tends to rearrange itself into shapes that absorb and release that energy better.

If he's right, life is not a lucky accident. It's something matter tends to do when energy keeps flowing through it. That idea is still being tested and debated, so treat it as a strong lead, not a closed case.

Why does a rock last by doing nothing, while you last by never stopping?

Chemist Addy Pross, working with Robert Pascal, gave this a name: dynamic kinetic stability.

Think of a river. It looks the same for years. But it's never the same water.

The engine behind this kind of stability is copying. A molecule that helps make more of itself grows exponentially. One becomes two. Two become four. Anything that copies better, lasts longer, or taps a new energy source pulls ahead. Over time, simple copiers become complex ones.

That's the big idea in Pross's work. The origin of life and evolution aren't two separate miracles. They're one continuous process.

Through the mirror

In 2024, Salk Institute scientists pushed copying into strange territory. All natural DNA and RNA on Earth share one "handedness," like a right hand. Mirror versions normally can't work with them.

The team built a right-handed RNA enzyme that assembles a left-handed copy of itself. That left-handed copy then builds the right-handed version back. Together, the pair grew exponentially, doubling about every hour.

Can you define all life in the universe in seven words?

In the 1990s, NASA needed a working definition to guide its search for life beyond Earth. A panel called the Exobiology Discipline Working Group settled on this:

Origin of life chemist Gerald Joyce is often credited with it. He says it came out of group discussion. Every part does a job.

Chemical system: made of real molecules, not code. Self-sustaining: it feeds and maintains itself. Darwinian evolution: it copies with small errors, and the environment keeps what works.

Joyce has said the difference between chemistry and biochemistry is history. Living molecules carry a record of what survived.

The definition has limits. Evolution happens across generations. A probe that finds a single microbe on Europa can't sit and watch it evolve. And viruses evolve fast, but they can't sustain themselves without hijacking a host cell. Whether they count is still debated.

What's the least you need to be alive?

The J. Craig Venter Institute tried a different route. Instead of defining life from the top down, they used subtraction.

Take a simple bacterium. Remove genes one by one. Keep only what the cell can't live without.

In 2016, the team unveiled JCVI-syn3.0. It ran on 473 genes. For scale, the E. coli in your gut carries about 4,000.

Two findings stopped scientists cold. First, about 41% of those genes exist just to read and use genetic information. Life is mostly an information machine.

Second, 149 of the 473 genes had no known function. Nearly a third of the bare minimum for life is still a black box.

Then came a twist. Syn3.0 grew, but it couldn't divide cleanly. Under the microscope, it made misshapen, oversized cells.

So in 2021, the team added 19 genes back. Seven of them turned out to be needed for normal division. Two were known division genes, called ftsZ and sepF. The roles of the other five are still unknown. The new cell, JCVI-syn3A, splits into neat, even spheres.

The lesson: chemistry alone wasn't enough. The cell also needed instructions for its own shape and its own edges.

Is life just very good information?

Chemist Lee Cronin and astrobiologist Sara Walker developed assembly theory. It counts the fewest steps needed to build a molecule from its parts.

Their claim: complex molecules found in many identical copies don't show up by chance. They need selection, which means life or technology. A 2021 study suggested a cutoff around 15 steps. Their 2023 paper in Nature made it a general theory.

Computer scientists led by Hector Zenil push back hard. They argue assembly theory is a version of data compression math that already existed. Same family of methods that shrinks your zip files.

Here's the part both camps agree on. Life reliably makes complex, unlikely structures, over and over. It's matter that runs on stored, compressed instructions.

Which raises a question for my AI readers. AI models compress huge amounts of information too. Does that make them alive? Hold that thought. The test in the next section answers it.

How would we recognize life that looks nothing like us?

In 2020, scientists Stuart Bartlett and Michael Wong proposed a definition broad enough for alien biology. They call the general category "lyfe" (pronounced "loif"). Earth life is just one example of it.

To count as lyfe, a system needs all four pillars:

1. DissipationIt uses a flow of energy to stay out of balance with its surroundings.
2. AutocatalysisIt can grow exponentially when resources allow. It makes more of itself.
3. HomeostasisIt regulates its inside against a changing outside.
4. LearningIt records information about its world and uses it to survive. Evolution is one kind of learning.

Something with only some of the pillars is "sublyfe." A hurricane moves enormous energy, but it doesn't regulate itself or learn. Run the test yourself.

The life we might be missing

This matters because our tools only find what they're built to find. Bacteria were first seen in the 1670s. A whole branch of life, the Archaea, wasn't recognized until 1977.

Physicist Paul Davies and philosopher Carol Cleland have asked whether a "shadow biosphere" of chemically different microbes could still be hiding on Earth. No one has found one. No one has ruled it out.

Cleland goes further. She argues we may be defining life too early. People once defined water as wet and clear, before anyone knew it was H₂O. Our definitions of life could be describing the surface, not the essence.

After 80 years, what does the strongest evidence actually say?

Here's the search in order:

• 1944Schrödinger: life feeds on order and stores heredity in a message-carrying molecule.
• 1990sNASA's panel: a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.
• 2010sPross and Pascal: dynamic kinetic stability. England: dissipative adaptation.
• 2016JCVI-syn3.0: the 473-gene minimal cell, with 149 genes of unknown function.
• 2020Bartlett and Wong: the four pillars of lyfe.
• 2021JCVI-syn3A: seven genes restore clean division. Assembly theory proposes a complexity cutoff.
• 2024Salk: mirror-image RNA copies itself exponentially.

Put the strongest pieces together and you get this:

Life is the universe organizing itself to remember what works.

If life runs on four pillars, how are yours running?

This is where I take off the lab coat. What follows is my working model, not a measured result.

The four pillars that define a cell also describe a life that works.

On an oncology floor, you learn what growth without regulation looks like. A cancer cell keeps the copying and loses the checks. One pillar runs wild because another went quiet. Healthy life is balance across all four.

This is the core of everything I build under Unify the Self. You are not too many things. You are one living system. When energy, growth, boundaries, and learning work together, the whole self shows up. When one is starved or running wild, everything feels off, even if you can't name why.

Energy is the first pillar for a reason. Every living thing starts with what flows in. EDEN | GPS for the Soul helps you identify what charges and energizes you, so you can become more authentic and aligned, broadcast your strongest signal, and attract your dream reality by simply being yourself.

Open EDEN

This article is built from published research and expert sources, cited so you can open them yourself.

1. Schrödinger, E. (1944). What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. Cambridge University Press.
2. England, J. L. (2013). Statistical physics of self-replication. Journal of Chemical Physics. doi.org/10.1063/1.4818538
3. Pross, A. (2012). What Is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology. Oxford University Press.
4. NASA Astrobiology. Forming a Definition for Life (interview with Gerald Joyce). astrobiology.nasa.gov
5. Benner, S. A. (2010). Defining Life. Astrobiology. PMC3005285
6. Cochrane, W. G., Bare, G. A. L., Joyce, G. F., and Horning, D. P. (2024). Cross-chiral exponential amplification of an RNA enzyme. PNAS. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2413668121
7. Hutchison, C. A., et al. (2016). Design and synthesis of a minimal bacterial genome. Science. doi.org/10.1126/science.aad6253
8. Pelletier, J. F., et al. (2021). Genetic requirements for cell division in a genomically minimal cell. Cell. doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2021.03.008
9. Marshall, S. M., et al. (2021). Identifying molecules as biosignatures with assembly theory and mass spectrometry. Nature Communications. doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23258-x
10. Sharma, A., et al. (2023). Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution. Nature. doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06600-9
11. Ozelim, L., Zenil, H., et al. (2024). Assembly theory is an approximation to algorithmic complexity. arXiv:2403.06629
12. Bartlett, S., and Wong, M. L. (2020). Defining Lyfe in the Universe: From Three Privileged Functions to Four Pillars. Life. doi.org/10.3390/life10040042
13. Davies, P. C. W., et al. (2009). Signatures of a shadow biosphere. Astrobiology. doi.org/10.1089/ast.2008.0251
14. Cleland, C. E. (2012). Life without definitions. Synthese. doi.org/10.1007/s11229-011-9879-7
15. Woese, C. R., and Fox, G. E. (1977). Phylogenetic structure of the prokaryotic domain. PNAS. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.74.11.5088
16. Boisseau, R. P., Vogel, D., and Dussutour, A. (2016). Habituation in non-neural organisms: evidence from slime moulds. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2016.0446

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