So what is the difference between you and a rock? This seems like an easy, even stupid question. But even the smartest people on earth have no idea where to draw the line between living and dead things. Which leads to mind-blowing implications. What is life after all? And is death really a thing? Lets look into it together

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What Is Life? Is Death Even Real?

The confusion starts from the several uses of the word “life” in English. There are at least three usages as exemplified by the following questions:

1) Is there life on Mars?

2) Is there life in this organism?

3) Is life worth living?

The definition of “life” in these three usages is quite different. In the first case, life refers to a collective phenomenon, in the second case it refers to the ability of an individual organism to metabolize and grow, and in the third case life refers to the history of activities that an organism undertakes. The first two usages are of direct relevance to astrobiology.

The usual definition of life, as used in the first case, is that it is a system of material entities that can undergo evolution, which implies reproduction, mutation and selection. This is what we are looking for on Mars and on other worlds. We would be most interested if it represented a second genesis, in other words an independent origin of life. It is often pointed out that the definition of life as a system capable of evolution implies that single, isolated individuals not of child-bearing age are not “life.” This is nonsense and confuses the first and second cases of “life.”