"So what is life?
Life is the representation, the "presencing" of past chemistries, a past environment of the early Earth that, because of life, remains on the modern Earth. It is the watery, membrane-bound encapsulation of spacetime. Death is part of life because even dying matter, once it reproduces, rescues complex chemical systems and budding dissipative structures from thermodynamic equilibrium. Life is a nexus of increasing sensitivity and complexity in a universe of parent matter that seems stupid and unfeeling in comparison. Life must maintain itself against the universal tendency of heat to dissipate with time. This thermodynamic view explains, in a way, the determination, the purposefulness of life - for billions years it has been stuck in a pattern which, even if it wanted to, it can't get out of, of upping the stakes as it goes. For life itself is - are - these patterns of chemical conservation in a universe tending towards heat loss and disintegration. Preserving the past, making a difference between past and present, life binds time, expanding complexity and creating new problems for itself."
-from What is Life, Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan
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