Re:New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life
by dmurray on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @05:01AM
(#16527931)
Except that they really do have a physical manifestation (from the article, the cylindrical tail, the polyhedral box containing the genes, the fibrils on the outside). In some way they are closer to being the USB stick containing the computer program, that can reproduce onto other USB sticks but needs a host computer to do so.
Re:New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life
by pluma on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @11:45AM
(#16529948)
Everything[0] has a physical manifestation. A computer program has a physical manifestation on its storage medium.
[0]: Let's not argue about whether it makes sense to say that abstract concepts also have a physical manifestation. Programs are concrete expressions encoded on a physical medium (whether using magnets, electrical charges or even the position of mechanical switches).
A virus is just a computer program that needs a Von Neumann machine (CPU) to run on. Following this analogy we could define alive by saying that the combination of a program and a Von Neumann machine makes the entity alive.