A Definition for Life?

There’s a fascinating article over on space.com (
Hot Gas in Space Mimics Life) describing the life-like behavior of interstellar gases. What caught my interest is the effort to define this behavior as either living or non-living, and the almost desperate sense that there’s no real definition for what life is.

I think the difficulty with finding a definition is the hidden assumption that some things are alive and some things are not. Why not recognize that the beauty and purposefulness (order) of existence is itself a living reality? While interstellar gas does not speak the human language or pro-create in the same manner as a human being or other biological organisms, why should that imply that inorganic matter, or space itself for that matter, is dead or non-living? Let it all be alive until we truly know differently. It’s far more fun that way and opens one up much more to the wonder of the living cosmos.

Rainbow Mysteries

The physics of a rainbow mean that each and every person viewing one is seeing his or her own private rainbow (the images of the rainbow are distributed, in the same way the image of the sun can be seen from every point of the sun-ward surface of earth — where you stand and look at the sun is a unique view, however minutely different it may be). Each rainbow is coming from the same source, the sun, but each rainbow is uniquely projected to the individual viewing it. Each is equally beautiful, yet each experience is personal and private and no one else can have it, even though each and every one emanates identically from the common source.