Jenos Idanian brought up this question: is fire alive?
If you were encountering fire for the first time, and had a set of criteria by which to decide what is living and what is not, how would you categorize it?
I’m intrigued. Jenos (from Earth, in the galaxy known as the Milky Way) stated it as though it was a commonplace thought experiment, but I’d never done that experiment.
You’d need to come up with a definition of life that excludes fire — and the only one I can come up with is the ability to evolve. But then what happens to bacteria that do not change for eons?
Dang, I’m famous!
Here’s the basic conceit: fire moves, reproduces, consumes, excretes, and reproduces. It inhales oxygen and exhales. smoke. It covers the basic definition of “life,” far better than a virus. It’s an old thought experiment. You gotta get into the “cellular structure” thing and other minutiae to really hash it out.
Thanks for the shout-out. I was just going for the “technical” angle with the hot dog thing, and the Epstein thing was just to fulfill the comedy Rule Of Three.
It is a fun little exercise, though.
Well, you can come to the bridge, also.
Mr. Sulu, photon torpedoes at the ready. And where the hell is Spock?
He’s over here, but his beard makes me slightly suspicious…
Life: a thing that contains the entirety of a set of mutable instructions required to produce itself, including the machinery required, and the ability to self-produce without any external input outside of raw materials and energy.
This separates fire from living things because fire does not reproduce based on a blueprint it’s simply a self-sustaining chemical reaction under certain conditions.
It also separates AInfrom living things as AI doesn’t include all the code necessary to produce the machinery for AI code to execute on. AI is also not capable of both learning and executing simultaneously.
I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.
Yes but you can’t base your definition of life on some future sci fi prediction of what someone thinks things will be like in the future. Remember the brightest scientists of 40 years ago were telling us we’d all be freezing to death now and the brightest scientists of 20 years ago were telling us we’d all be burning to a crisp now.
When reality actually forces a change in the definition we’ll work on changing it, much like the discovery of DNA forced a change that allows for a definition of life that excludes fire. Or maybe it won’t change and we will succeed in creating life from whole cloth…what’s wrong with that? Extinction is bad. So UNextiction is good, right?
Also you assume that the AI overlords won’t be us….which I’m not so sure is a certainty.
I’m not so sure it isn’t a certainty. But as long as it happens more than 25 years from now I’m good.
I just know there’s a joke in there, somewhere.
Birminghamo Erectus?
Homo Drapiens?
Linenism?
“We Are The Wool”?
Survival of the Fitted Sheet?
To be, or knit to be?
As long as you can get it wholesale.
From the Karma-ent District.
During a fire is not alive sale.
Real fire, not nutria.
Still a better presidential candidate than Biden.