Thread:User talk:Armondikov/Life, the Universe and Everything/reply

In short, yes.

But as for what life could be, it could be anything depending on what you recognise as life. If you can point to it and say "life", then it's life. But that doesn't therefore mean it has unalienable rights and whatnot - for that you have to state specific properties that are relevant to what you want to do with it. In your Native American view, which is nice and poetic of course, you wouldn't say that a rock has the right to "life, liberty and property" - because it doesn't posses the features that make "life, liberty and property" meaningful to it.

We should never be as generic and general as trying to shoehorn things into "alive" and "not alive" because there is no reason that the universe should kowtow to our opinion that way.