sent2null space

The definition of what constitutes a living thing is not as cut and dried as many would think. If we define a living thing as something that takes materials from its environment , consumes them to make energy and reproduce themselves, and then excretes waste...then stars are alive and most chemical reactions can also said to be living ones, so how do we distinguish what we familiarly call "life" from ordinary chemical processes. Can we add in the restriction that the interactions must be performed by multicellular organisms to be alive then we have just removed many types of archaic bacteria and viruses from the category of "life" and we know that these organisms are capable of reproducing themselves. Maybe the problem is the question, maybe we have used a much too narrow definition of "life", I propose that instead of defining life in terms of resource utilization and reproduction that we define it in terms of one thing that life does that non life does n...