What is life?

Life?

What is life?

How does a living thing differ from a thing non-living?

The Earth spins; it has been spinning for eons,

On its own and on and on.

It also tugs, pulls, and swings around a star, the Sun.

Ever since it was formed.

It has been growing too,

Gathering from space more and more mass.

It does many other intricate things,

So that Lewis Thomas, once famously said,

'The Earth is a single living cell.'

Is it really so?

Look at a roaring typhoon,

Powered by its own steam,

Tearing through oceans, lakes and seas

And flooding the vast coastlines,

And then hitting a land mass and breathing its last.

Is the hurricane alive?

Or it is only a bubble of very large size?

Or look at a sky-spinning cyclone,

You call the whirlwind.

It is born with a butterfly's flip.

Then it grows and moves,

Sweeps through deserts and continents,

Lifting clouds of dust and vapors to mountain tops.

Full of energy as it hops,

And then dropping dead, falling on its nose.

Will you call a cyclone a living thing?

(Well, it is born, it grows and it dies;)

Or, it is only a gush of wind of enormous size.

No, No, No. Let us not confuse.

The Earth and other phenomena are natural systems -

And so is our Life –

They are all systems of mass and energy,

Systems of atoms and molecules

Systems of pulls and pushes

Systems of elements and the whole.

There are countless systems in nature,

Some are far and some are near.

Some are there right now

And some are long past.

But let us be clear:

Life is only one of them.

Of course, it is unique in many ways.

We humans have had a good look.

From here to the edge of the Universe,

From now to all the way back to Big Bang

And deep into the world of quarks and bosons,

There is no other system

Even superfluously similar to the system of life on Earth.

Life is a system where each element grows but merges into a whole,

A system that in its prime splits into two of its kind.

A system that can make a copy of itself from head to toe,

Generation after generation – billions of generations in row,

A system that can mutate, radiate and proliferate,

A system that can compete within and adapts without.

We humans have carefully studied it and given it a name.

We call the system, life.

The mighty Earth and many others are natural systems.

And so is a humble worm.

But who is living, we have grounds to say:

The worm yes; the Earth nay.

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- Baldev Raj Dawar,

March, 2013