Prove my friend wrong...he said FIRE fits all the criteria for being ALIVE?

Question

It requires oxygen. It moves. It grows. It dies. It needs fuel. It creates waste. How, then, is fire NOT a living thing? I couldn't prove to my friend that fire isn't alive. Help!

Answer 1

Defining something as being "alive" is still an incredibly difficult thing to do as our understanding of living organisms and beings is ever changing.

One aspect of your friend's argument that immediately stuck out to me was that it requires oxygen. Many things that are "alive" do not require oxygen. Plants, for example, require carbon dioxide, oxygen is their waste.

The biggest obstacle to considering fire "alive", though, is that it is not composed of cells, which is generally included in every definition of something being alive. Plants, animals, humans, and even bacteria are all made up of cells, fire is not.

Additionally, fire does require kindling, or "fuel" as your friend described, but it does not metabolize it's fuel, as other organisms do.

Also, most definitions of life include that the object/being must be able to reproduce. Fire does spread, but it is not reproducing.

Answer 2

Tell your friend to set a large fire in a safe place.
Then tell him to keep it alive for a week (SAFELY!).
I guarantee that he'll have to keep feeding that fire himself.
For a day,a week,a month.That fire will never be able to go out and seek it's own sustenance.
Also....Fire is older than man.Man evolved.Fire did not !Fire is still fire.
How is it,then,that we don't have firepeople? Little firebabies would be a most unwelcome guest in any home!
Fire might have evolved into something more intelligent than what it is now,but we killed that offspring long ago with shovels and water.

Answer 3

It all hinges on what he calling 'alive'. Obviously fire is not alive. It cannot travel at will like a living creature can. It cannot seek its own food.

Obviously a living creature requires water. Don't think fire can use water to sustain.

Your friend has given you restrictions, but allowing his 'definition' a wide scope.....which is like.....cheating....lol.

Anyone can make up anything and then challenge someone else to debunk it, and all the while make up the rules as they go. Kinda like the way our government works.

Answer 4

Fire cannot reproduce because it has no genetic material to pass on. There for it is not alive. Furthermore, Fire has no cellular structure, fire is simply is the result of energy being converted into a new form.

Answer 5

Well it's alive in the sense that it moves but not alive in the sense that you would consider it a living thing.

First, living things are capable of reproduction. Fire does not multiply, it just grows.
Two, living things have a network of complex body structures and systems that allow them to survive (like our circulatory and nervous systems). Fire is just... fire throughout.
Three, c'mon, tell your friend to use his/her common sense. :-)

Answer 6

Yeah, pretty much what everyone else said. They can't reproduce, and have no genetic material. Also, it's a form of plasma, and by natural law it can't be living. Hell, it doesn't have any mass. However, flames do have mass. Your friend's an idiot. Tell him this: If this sentence is true, then Santa Clause exists. It'll stump him.

Answer 7

confident women and adult men persons can basically be acquaintances. i'm witness to it on a daily basis. My husband has an extremely good woman chum, greater like a sister separated at beginning. there have been situations that I even have felt like the third wheel yet I even have labored via those subject concerns with my husband.

Answer 8

fire isn't alive it's thermal energy created by chemicals coming together and burning

-plus another charicteristic of life is reproduction and fire dosnt really reproduce

(FIRE ISN'T LIVING IT'S A FORM OF ENERGY)

Answer 9

That is such a great question!!!!! The hardest thing in the world is to find a definition of "life" that is unambiguous. That points to the great difficulty in the search for extra-terrestrial life, because we may not recognize as "life" what some ET's call "life", and they may not recognize us as "life".

Answer 10

Anything that is living, be it plant, animal, fungus, or bacterium stores genetic data that is passed on in reproduction of some kind. Fire does not.