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Slick:
So I actually think the 'alive' model is perfectly valid by the definition of life I learned. It really applies to the biosphere and not 'the planet', though, which is a screwy bit of language sometimes. Colonizing Mars is a totally valid incidence of reproduction of our biosphere, and I'm sure the bacteria in your digestive tract have their own opinions on marshmallows, or in my case, cheap beer (no I am not assigning any necessary degree of intelligence or emotional capacity to bacteria just using a word in a stretched situation). Likewise, I take all the water out of you and launch it into space and it'll keep right on being water. Or you can take the rocks out of a bird's gullet for the same effect.
I think the problem is more that someone sometime was like 'hey guys, wtf is life?' and then someone else was like 'dude look at this list of approximately seven things, that seems like a sensible definition of life amirite?' and now somebody else is like 'lol your definition applies to the everythings everywheres' and some other people are like 'fuuuuuuuuuuuuckkkk yoooouuuuu'.
What I mean to say is, those 'defining characteristics of life' are just a list of things we came up with to try and categorize 'life', life, of course, being a word that is full of all sorts of other connotations in language. We have written up a list of things, and found things that fit all the things in that list. We have done nothing more and nothing less, and if we use that list as a definition of a word, then the word fits, but nothing else has been ascribed based on that definition.
Yes, the biosphere is alive and can be modeled as a single living thing. No, I do not believe it has a soul or a spirit any more than I believe the seeds in my garden, my neighbour's dog, or my dead loved ones have or had a soul.
I think it is dangerous to take a 'scientific' definition of life to be anything other than exactly what it is.



--- Quote from: onewheelwizzard on 26 Apr 2009, 08:29 ---The example I keep coming back too is the Gaea hypothesis, the idea that the biosphere of planet Earth is a living thing unto itself.  There is no way to approach this idea using the scientific method.  No test or measurement we could apply would conclusively tell us that the biosphere is a unified and living thing or isn't.  It's a question of what model we use to envision the biosphere, and from the point of view of the scientific method, it's an arbitrary and effectively meaningless distinction because it's a question with no testable or provable answer.  I happen to think it's extremely important for humans to start thinking of the Earth as a living thing, so I have an issue with a society that depends on the scientific method as an arbiter of truth to the extent that it sees this question as meaningless.

--- End quote ---
See, I like the idea of thinking of the earth as a living thing, it's a neat concept and is useful for helping us think about our actions, but I think it's silly to get carried away with it. I also find your claim that no test can tell us this thing to be a little stupid. We just haven't designed a test. If the thing exists and has an effect on us, there must be a way to observe its effects. If there are no effects to observe, then it effectively doesn't exist. If we can't observe it's effects yet, hopefully we will be clever enough to do so later.

KharBevNor:

--- Quote from: Slick on 27 Apr 2009, 08:11 ---Colonizing Mars is a totally valid incidence of reproduction of our biosphere,

--- End quote ---

It's really not.

snalin:
Really, it is.

Look at the earth as a plant that reproduce asexually. For it to reproduce, it would need to make a seed (humans), send it away from itself (space expeditions), let the seed land in soil (Mars), and root and start to grow (colonization and adaption of an atmosphere). There's no problem to the idea that "Mother Earth" is sentient, and able to influence evolution and entire races to become a space faring, and find other planets to colonize. I guess this falls into the realm of belief, and it's not less likely than most other mainstream religions.

Onewheel, you've said something in the direction of wanting more research and investigation into stuff that's beyond our senses, like the universe being alive and similar ideas. How do you think that this can be done? I'm genuinely intrigued; how can you figure out stuff that isn't even related to our range of reference and knowledge?

KharBevNor:
No, that's a metaphor for reproduction, not actual reproduction. When an organism reproduces it makes something that is very like itself. A human colony on another planet would not be anything like the biosphere of earth. It would be like a dog giving birth to a cat.

Slick:
See I don't want to get into an argument about reproduction but the reason I think your arguement doesn't defeat it is that it's giving birth to an ecosystem and planetary ecosystems have different notions of similarity and likeness. Just look at what you think of as defining properties of people, how those properties change throughout the species, and then think of defining properties of an ecosystem, and how much that can vary.
If we terraformed Mars up from scratch, it would probably have a lot in common with earth, despite how fucking wacky Mars actually is. If you're talking, say, we find a planet with trees that grow upside down and all the animals have two legs and a wheely-limb, that'd be a different story and I didn't actually consider that.

I'm just interested in this because I think our definition of life is a little loose and our reaction when someone talks about being alive relate not to the definition of life that we use but perhaps to what we think life means on some other level. I've just finished a course on general relativity and intro cosmology, where we modeled the universe as a fluid where the basic particles (the analouges to atoms/molecules in your regular gasses and fluids) are galaxies or clusters of galaxies so I'm just thinking about generalizing things to weird scales.

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