The Problem's In Defining What Life Is (Score 4)

Before we can know that we've created life, we should reach some consensus on what life is. Self-awareness would seem to be too high of a standard, for surely a single-celled bacterium has no idea it exists, or that a universe of other entities exist. It's doubtful even higher order plants and animals have such awareness, though my cats seem to possess an inordinate sense of self-awareness. On the other hand, reproduction would seem to be a requirement for all life. So would a requirement that the entity engage and manage some internal and external processes. Breathing, eating, foraging, mating, waste disposal, etc. are examples of processes. Rocks just sit there and engage or manage no process, so we say they are not alive. Conversely, the tiniest thing that does something, we immediately recognize it as living. Therefore, I'm not entirely sure life hasn't been already created in software form. That fact that a software entity may only survive in the virtual environment it was created in, hardly seems to exclude it from consideration as a life form. My tomato plant can't survive outside the soil I planted it in, but still, it's alive. So what if we can we create a something that consumes ever-more resources, bloats in size, mutates, and experiences exponential growth in its distribution? Bill Gates and company have been doing that for years.