> How are nanobes & prions determined to have life?
They aren’t.
To quote: “No conclusive evidence exists that [nanobes] are, or are not, living organisms, so their classification is controversial.”
> Are there microscopic Turing tests?
No. That’s what we’re telling you. “Life” is not well-defined. The textbook definition you might have seen in school would misclassify fire as alive.
For a fun take on this, look up the comedy podcast (starring Professor Brian Cox) called “The Infinite Monkey Cage”, specifically all the episodes which ask if a (freshly picked) strawberry is alive and if not when exactly did it die.
They aren’t.
To quote: “No conclusive evidence exists that [nanobes] are, or are not, living organisms, so their classification is controversial.”
You say nanobes aren't life, but then you say you don't know? Pick one.
“Life” is not well-defined. The textbook definition you might have seen in school would misclassify fire as alive.
Sorta pretentious to just define life to fit existing narratives when you don't have an explanation. We have to figure out more instead of stopping at what we don't understand.
> You say nanobes aren't life, but then you say you don't know? Pick one.
No, ben_w said that they “aren’t ‘determined to have life’”. That’s a very different statement.
But I’ll go out and say it: they aren’t life. Nobody is talking about nanobes any more. There is no research on nanobes in the life sciences. This is not a hyperbole, I mean that the number of articles published on nanobes in over two decades is literally zero. No single lab in the whole world is researching them. The last scientific publication on the topic, from 2001, was a review concluding that there’s nothing to it.
They were an embarrassing mistake that briefly made headlines.
> Sorta pretentious to just define life to fit existing narratives when you don't have an explanation.
I’m having trouble understanding where you’re going with this sentence.
I’m not defining life, I’m saying there isn’t a definition of life (that I know of) which seems satisfactory.
Also, I don’t think it would be pretentious to start with a definition that fits existing narratives, because that’s how most words work: a label for a bunch of examples, followed by a rule — a definition — which creates a pattern for those examples. Like fire “metabolising” oxygen and fuel to reproduce and “move”, but not being alive. When you find edge cases, either change the definition to fit the new data or create a new category for the new data [1]. I know that domain experts don’t use that previous definition of life for exactly the reason I gave, but last I checked “are viruses alive?” still got arguments.
Also also, treating life as a fifth fundamental force of the universe when chemistry explains all the components just fine is… well, literally pretentious.
[1] That’s just an IMO about language, of course: if language was that simple then NLP would be a solved problem.
Also also, treating life as a fifth fundamental force of the universe when chemistry explains all the components just fine is… well, literally pretentious.
No. Stating that chemistry explains all the components of life just fine is literally pretentious.
Maybe chemists should stop researching since they already explained everything?
Now you’re just nitpicking. So far every single process we have analysed occurring in living things has worked exactly as we expect from our understanding of chemistry. There just isn’t any reason to expect we will find anything chemistry can’t explain, and you haven’t given us any reason to do so or a way to test for such a thing.
To put it another way, what leads you to your conclusion? What evidence is it based on? What phenomena that we currently observe might such a thing explain, and how?
Whether or not those things are alive is a matter of debate, many scientists say that they exhibit some of the properties of living things but not all of them.
There are many web sites that discuss the properties of living things, I’ve linked a decent one below. It might be useful to think of it in terms of a ‘running’ engine. If I switch a running engine off, or it runs out of fuel, or someone breaks it with a hammer it stops running. Being alive for an organism is analogous to being in a ‘running’ state for an engine. It’s not an attribute of any individual components, but rather a description of the behaviour of the whole system.
Are there microscopic Turing tests?
And cytoplasm isn't DNA/RNA itself.