Cheltenham HS

What is Life?

After reading and thinking about the theories other people have come up with as to what is life, I still am not completely sure what the distinction between living and non - living is. I believe, however, that the answer lies more in the intangible qualities living things experience than in what makes them up or what chemical processes they carry out. Life at its most basic level is the simple cycle beginning with birth, followed by a period of development and procreation, and eventually ending with death. This process can be as instantaneous as a spark or as infinite as a millennium. It can create a being as ordinary as a single cell, or as complex as an entire person. Life is a delicate presence, something we have not yet learned to understand and explain, and possibly never will. I think the person who conveyed what I imagine life as best is philosopher Alan Watts when he said, “Life is not a fixed thing but a flowing event.”

It frightens me a little to wonder how consciousness and thought came into being. I do not know if it is because a part of me wants to explain it by believing in a supernatural power creating the world, or if it is that the other options are almost just as incomprehensible. It gives me a strange feeling of closure to think that all the universe was created in seven days, but I do not truly believe that is how it all started. Of all the evidence I have heard arguing the different viewpoints, I find the hypotheses proposed by Alexander Oparin the most compelling. I suppose the first life forms would have had to be formed by means of abiogenesis, and his chemical evolution explanation makes the most sense to me. I think it is perfectly possible that the elements in the primitive atmosphere reacted with the available energy to create organic molecules that over time became more and more sophisticated beings. It is certainly more convincing than frogs coming out of the mud. The experiments done by Stanley Miller, Harold Urey, and Sidney Fox only help to fuel my belief in Oparin’s theory. The amino acids Miller and Urey produced in their recreation seem to be the most likely predecessor to the first proteins, and the microspheres Fox developed by heating amino acids in water seem to be the most likely precursors of the first cells. I am not totally persuaded, however. If someone else comes up with a different ideology that is just as valid in the future, I will not hesitate to consider it. I still wonder if it is possible to dissect life into something that can be represented with letters and numbers and recreated in a test tube. I think the development of life has something in it that can never be reproduced, only destroyed.