Posted by:
schrodingerscat
(
)
Date: December 03, 2021 04:47PM
https://youtu.be/Tryg5UCp6fIAfter watching this video I ordered this author’s book, Life’s Edge: The Search For What It Means To Be Alive”
Both the video and the book attempt to answer the unsettled question, “Are viruses alive?”
To answer it, first you have to answer,”What is life?” Which Schrodinger asked, 70yrs ago.
The definition NASA uses is,”a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”
By that definition the answer is, no, viruses are not alive, because they are not ‘self sustaining’ they rely upon their host cells and their neuro/electrical/chemical systems in order to reproduce. Whereas cells reproduce very slowly, viruses reproduce very rapidly, by the hundreds. There are trillions of bacteria inside of us, most of them good, probiotics. Some of them bad, like ecoli. We have a natural defense however, bacteriaPhages, which vastly outnumber bacteria in our bodies and elsewhere on Earth.
They eat 40% of the bacteria in the ocean every day.
If you stacked up all the viruses on Earth, they’d go past the solar system, past our galaxy, past 26 galaxies, make a 200million light year tall stack, one virus wide.
They are arguably responsible for half of our DNA.
They are perhaps the most important creature on the planet, yet they are not ‘alive’ by NASA’s definition.
But theirs is not the only definition. Perhaps a better definition is, ‘A biological system capable of reproduction and evolution.”
It meets that definition precisely and spectacularly, as evidenced by the rapidly evolving Corona Virus.
Perhaps the way to determine if something is alive is to define what makes something not alive?
Are crystals alive? Viruses can form into crystals and survive and reproduce once they are rehydrated.
So can tardigrades.
Were they still ‘alive’ when they were crystallized?