what is life?

Answer 1

The process of living...or more correctly respiring, eating, reproducing, etc.

Answer 2

Life is a precarious balance between happy and sad, good and bad, pretty and ugly, mercy versus the absence of mercy, idealism versus reality, woman and man, living and death, limits versus no limits, and love.

Although many have tried to define life through materialism, many cannot. Because no matter how many things are gained, they will never satisfy the spririt's longing for internal peace. True peace, inner and outer, can only be brought about through the understanding that it is better to give than to receive. The Christian Bible teaches us this fact through the examples of Jesus Christ.

Life is also a mathematical equation. Life is very similar to Pi - - it is infinity, because like the time line that runs in a continuous pattern, our lives will continue to do the same. For example, if one were to walk toward a wall from twenty feet away, and then aproach the wall by first taking one step, then half the length of that step, than half the length of that step, and so on, one would never reach the wall because of the mathematical properties of infinity.

In the same way, life is infinity. Lives are slowly evolving by the first year, and then those lives are doubled, then increased by a third, ect. This is how wisdom is established - - by human experiences and emotional growth relative to time. This wisdom increases in this exponential manner until death.

However, time itself is not linear. Time does seem to have a curve, however slight to human perception, just as the world seems flat to people who live on its surface, the earth is indeed a sphere from a distant view. Life is not linear, either. Life follows a curved path of infinity. Within that realm of infinity, the infinitively dimensional line which represents life can, like real numbers, fall above or below the number line.

Life is also psychology. Misunderstandings, control, fears, agony, sadness, happiness, joy, ect. all contribute to the sound mind responsible for making life decisions.

Happiness is Bliss. And once one absorbs the meaning of life, life is happiness.

Answer 3

If asked from scientific point of view, there are many definitions. From Aristotle to modern scientists have tried to answer this question in many ways. Some of them are as follows: 1)It is the manifestation of the interactions taking place between a living thing and its environment. 2)It is the complex combination of the organised states of a living being 3) It is the activities of complex organic materials having the following characteristics viz., birth, growth, reproduction, evolution, and death. But actually it's very hard to define life in a concise manner. If you ask me from lighter stand point I'll answer that, Life is a great thing!!! .Also try the link I found on search.lol.

Answer 4

Life is a multi-faceted concept. Life may refer to the ongoing process of which living things are a part; the period between the birth (or a point at which the entity can be considered to be living) and death of an organism; the condition of an entity that has been born (or reached the point in its existence at which it can be established to be alive) and has yet to die; and that which makes a living thing alive.

Answer 5

Life is the characteristic state of organisms. Properties common to terrestrial organisms (plants, animals, fungi, protists and bacteria) are that they are cellular, carbon-and-water-based with complex organization, having a metabolism, a capacity to grow, respond to stimuli, reproduce and—through natural selection—adapt.

An entity with the above properties is considered to be organic life. However, not every definition of life considers all of these properties to be essential. For example, the capacity for descent with modification is often taken as the only essential property of life. This definition notably includes viruses, which do not qualify under narrower definitions as they are acellular and do not metabolise. Broader definitions of life may also include theoretical non-carbon-based life and other alternative biology.

The entire Earth contains about 75 billion tons of biomass (life), which lives within various environments within the biosphere.

Answer 6

This is interesting question. It is of course one of the three big philosophical questions in biology, along with "how did life arise?" and "what is consiousness?". The questions of what life is and how it arose are very closely related, because at some point non-living material has to take on living characteristics.

A curious observation concerning life is that it may be hard to define, but we all recognise it when we see it. In fact there is a list of characteristics that define a living organism-people may object to any of these in isolation, but taken together they constitute a fairly complete description. Living things move, they feed, they excrete, they respire (generate energy) they grow, they sense their environment, they reproduce and they evolve. It's true to say that a flame does many of these things, but we know instinctively that a flame isn't the same as a living thing. It could be said to excrete CO2 for instance, by "respiring" combustible materials with oxygen, but no-one would argue that this is the same type of process as cellular respiration.

In one way, the characteristics of life are quite easy to define, because the only life we know is life on earth. Then the question becomes "what is life as we know it?". Life on earth is defined by the biochemicals that we identify in living things, so my simple definition of a living thing is one in which DNA and RNA are used as the basis for genetic information transfer and proteins are used as structural components and catalytic agents.

This isn't really answering your question of course, all we have done so far is defined the components of a living cell. You used the word "organised" in your question and the key to life is organisation, in particular self-organisation. Living cells are "eddies of order in a stream of chaos". In chemical terms, they are regions in which entropy is decreased and non-equilibrium conditions are maintained. This is often misunderstood as going against the 2nd law of thermodynamics, but remember that the 2nd law refers to a closed system. The universe is an open system and it's fine for local areas to decrease their entropy so long as the overall trend is upwards.

A hot research topic at the moment is therefore the notion of "self- organising systems", in other words how does something which is essentially a soup of molecules organise itself into a complex, functioning system? We are beginning to see that this is not so great a problem as it first sounds. Even quite simple chemical systems can display organisation, simply as a consequence of the properties of the molecules involved and the way in which they physically interact. But what I feel these studies are missing is the fact that when we observe a cell, we are seeing the product of billions of years of evolution. True, if we view the components of a cell in isolation as molecules, it's hard to see how they work. But life isn't about taking these components, mixing them together and saying "well I've just got molecule soup, how can that work?" As with cooking you need ingredients and time. What we observe today came about gradually as more and more components were brought together, mixed, interacted, used or discarded as needed and without knowing the sequence of events, we may never fully understand how a cell came to be.

I hope these thoughts don't sound too vague and wishy-washy! My personal view is that "what is life?" isn't a very useful question, it's a bit like saying "what is reality?" or "what is the number eleven?" Science should really be aimed at asking well-defined questions with yes or no answers. It's a difficult area, but I'd say we have defined the characteristics of life and we have some notion of how a cell is organised. Understanding how the complex properties of a cell emerge is in many ways a problem for mathematicians, provided they don't forget about evolution!

If you haven't already, try the famous book "What is Life?" by Erwin Schrodinger-it's still thought provoking, although somewhat dated and naive now. And if you think you can demonstrate how life arose, you can win big money at http://www.us.net/life/!

Answer 7

Life is the characteristic state of organisms. Properties common to terrestrial organisms (plants, animals, fungi, protists and bacteria) are that they are cellular, carbon-and-water-based with complex organization, having a metabolism, a capacity to grow, respond to stimuli, reproduce and—through natural selection—adapt.

An entity with the above properties is considered to be organic life.

Answer 8

Life is asking what is life ?

Answer 9

Life is very mistirious thing. So to understand a life is very importanant thing in ur life. So try to understand life in ur life first and then do other activities in ur life.

Answer 10

Life is beyond explanation,a divine spark in each organism.you can only know the true meaning of life when you experience it and realize that life is nothing but it is GOD.

Answer 11

Life is like a Flowchat. its depand upon u waht kind of flow u r giving to it for feel like where u r leaving in the heaven.