Life

:::::::::: ''"What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the'' 
:::::::::: ''winter time. It is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset."''
:::::::::: ''Crowfoot, chief of the Blackfoot Indians, 1890'' 

'''Life''' is a state that distinguishes organisms from non-living objects, 
such as non-life, and dead organisms, characterized by growth 
through metabolism and reproduction. Note that metabolism and 
reproduction are both self-* properties, they are associated 
with the self-reproduction of the body and the species, respectively. 
[[Self-Star_Properties|self-* properties]] belong to the most fundamental
characteristics of life.

It is debatable if "life itself is evil", as Vasily Grossman asks 
in his book "Life and Fate", but it is certainly right to say 
that '''life is selfish'''. Life is an exceptional 
state characterized by strong [[Self-Star_Properties|self-* properties]] and 
high [[Complexity|complexity]] which aries from selfish [[Gene|genes]].
The complexity arises partly from the tendency to increase order and decreases 
entropy - a physical characteristic of life. This is possible in open systems which are
able to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of substances or free 
energy taken in from the environment.

Life [[Emergence|emerges]] out of the organized interactions of a great number 
of nonliving molecules, with no global organizer or central controller 
responsible for the behavior of every part (although there are many
distributed controllers in form of genes). Life is the behavior 
that emerges from out of all of the local interactions among 
individual behaviors. 

An astronaut viewing earth from space would
probably say life is where the earth is ("a
blue planet in the vastness of empty space).
A bushman from the Kalahari desert would perhaps
say life is where water is ("a green oasis in
an endless desert"), while an Inuit from the
North Pole would argue that life is where
light is ("a red fire at 20 degrees below
zero surrounded by a desert of frozen ice").

Life is simply the opposite of non-life,
a condition that distinguishes friendly
from lethal environments, and organisms
from inorganic objects. Since non-living
inorganic objects are the majority in the
universe, one can say that life is the
exception. The abnormal condition
("disease") which can be found in small
pockets of the universe at the edge of chaos,
where self-replicating entities made of star
dust resist the general tentency of increasing
disorder and decay.

Life is the existence of organic entities
with self-* properties in the void of empty
space: entities which replicate, organize,
generate, maintain and move themselves. It is
a dynamic, self-organizing state of matter,
controlled by information subject to natural
selection. To see life as the breath of buffalo
on a cold winter's day is of course much more
poetic than to say life is a universal bundle
of self-* properties located in a corner
of the universe at the edge of chaos. Or is it?

== Links ==

* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life Wikipedia Entry for Life]

* [http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_meaning_of_life/ The Meaning of (the term) life]

* [http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2007/09/what_is_life_again.php What is "life"]