The Complexity of Life: Beyond the Basics
We are alive and we do not doubt that, and so are numerous numbers of creatures, including that rat, the hamster, the plant, and that fungus mushroom growing close to a tree in your backyard. So what differentiates us from non-living rocks and stones, or if we are going to ask, what is life?
Every living thing that has ever existed is a product of the universe and a process of the universe. Before you start to look down on those non-living things, stating that we all follow the law of physics is something that binds us together. Before you start to read this post and you wonder that this person is just sharing the obvious known stuffs about life like it is made up cells that grows and develops, reproduces, and uses energy, I am not disputing this fact, in fact In subscribe to it but there is more about life than that and if you take your time to read and understand, you will get it in the simplest of words.
Okay, let's agree that you say life can grow and replicate itself what do you say about a crystal that also grows and replicate itself but isn't categorized as life, some non-living things like the Ocean can maintain homeostasis keeping its mineral composition balanced, and it can also maintain pH, fire can also grow to become bigger and replicate, so is life the same thing for a biologist as it is for a physicist or a chemist?
Carl Sagan, an American astronomer, planetary scientist, and science communicator looked at life as atoms doing interesting things, saying we are made up of atoms and we can back date that thought to physicist Erwin Schrodinger who in 1944 published a book titled "what is life?". He emphasized that life in its basic form can be viewed as atoms and he said talked about using physics and mathematics to form complex things like humans and animals.
Energy is required for living thing to live first off. We eat so as to get nutrients to get energy, and we use this energy to power life. In simple term energy is the currency of life. Energy cannot destroyed and since the big bang, the energy produce still exists even when they change form, they still remain. Looking at thermodynamics, the universe is becoming more disoriented and we are just a part of it until it reaches a state of entropy.
The big bang is the reservoir of order for energy if you trace every form of energy back properly and there is always a disorder to keep thing orderly in like the refrigerator cooling as a result of a heat disorder at its back. The sun just like every other star in the universe took energy from the original order at the beginning of the universe and has been slowly giving out that energy in a disordered form for billions of years and we see this as energy from sunlight.
All life today gets their energy from the sun either directly or indirectly, so this gives credit to the sun being the source of order in our disordered cosmos. The earth absorbs as much energy as it gives off as infrared radiation energy, this can be seen when leaves absorb energy from the sun, they use it to break bonds of hydrogen and oxygen to make sugar along with carbon dioxide and in doing so releases oxygen for other forms of life that need it. When cell borrow energy from the sun in form of ATP and DNA, they are sent back in the form of heat which is disorder. Remember that we all depend on the sun directly and indirectly.
Life is dependent on Order and not energy alone, and when we use this order we pay back. If we could go back through time meeting every ancestor and finding our way back to the big bang, is it possible that we find the first living thing that was able to convert geochemistry to biochemistry? If we can find the answer in earth since it is billions of years gone, scientists are looking if those answers can be found on planets like Mars.
That said, if we are to look at life and bring it down to protons and electrons, it might look like we aren't completely explaining life because it is more complex than that. Understanding life is still being researched in different fields from Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Astronomy. For now, keep to what you know about life while you make more research on it because it is live diving into the unknown.
Read More
https://cooperative-individualism.org/sagan-carl_who-speaks-for-earth-1980.htm
http://strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/schrodinger-what-is-life-mind-matter-auto-sketches.pdf
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/what-is-life/30D56B37840DAFB73E580BED1C056919
https://www.studysmarter.co.uk/explanations/biology/ecological-levels/solar-energy-and-life-on-earth/
https://www.space.com/19321-sun-formation.html
https://opentextbc.ca/biology/chapter/4-1-energy-and-metabolism/
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/photosynthesis/
https://www.olympus-lifescience.com/en/microscope-resource/primer/lightandcolor/lightandenergyintro/
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/cellular-energetics/photosynthesis/a/light-dependent-reactions
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/26403/chapter/3
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/schrodinger/What-Is_Life-7.pdf
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