Name: 人生とは何か？死は現実なのか？ (What Is Life? Is Death Real?)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T05:21:42.000Z
Duration: 5 min 57 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

様態の副詞

Life is fundamentally different from dead stuff—or is it?

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger defined life this way:

Living things avoid decay into disorder and equilibrium.

Let's pretend that your download folder is the universe.

It started orderly and got more and more chaotic over time.

By investing energy, you can create order and clean it up.

Every living thing on this planet is made of cells.

Basically, a cell is a protein-based robot too small to feel or experience anything.

It has the properties we just assign to life:

it has a wall that separates it from the surroundings, creating order;

it regulates itself and maintains a constant state;

But of all the stuff that makes up a cell, no part is alive.

Stuff reacts chemically with other stuff, forming reactions

that start other reactions which start other reactions.

In a single cell, every second several million chemical reactions take place,

A cell can build several thousand types of protein:

some very simple, some complex micromachines.

Imagine driving a car at 100 km/h while constantly rebuilding every single

part of it with stuff you collect from the street.

But no part of the cell is alive; everything is dead matter

So is life the aggregate of all these reaction processes that are taking place?

The goal of the whole process is to prevent this by producing new entities;

Life is, in a way, just a lot of stuff that carries genetic information around.

Every living thing is subject to evolution,

and the DNA that develops the best living thing around it will  stay in the game.

If you take DNA out of its hull, it certainly is a very complex molecule,

This is where viruses make everything more complicated.

They are basically strings of RNA or DNA in a small hull

We're not sure if they count as living or dead.

And still, there are 225,000,000 m&sup3; of viruses on Earth.

They don't seem to care what we think of them.

There are even viruses that invade dead cells and reanimate them

so they can be a host for them, which blurs the line even more.

They are the  power plants of most complex cells and

were previously free living bacteria that entered a partnership with bigger cells.

They still have their own DNA and can multiply on their own, but

they are not alive anymore; they are dead.

So they traded their own life for the survival of their DNA,

which means living things can evolve into dead things as long as it's beneficial

So, maybe life is information that manages to ensure its continued existence.

But what about AI (artificial intelligence)?

By our most common definitions, we are very close to creating artificial life

It's just a question of time before the technology we build gets there.

there are a lot of smart people actively working on this.

You could already argue that computer viruses are alive.

the idea that life is fundamentally different from non-living things

because they contain some non-physical element

or are governed by different principles than inanimate objects

Before Charles Darwin, humans drew a line between themselves and the rest

of living things; there was something magical about us that made us special.

Once we had to accept we are like every living being, a product of evolution,

But the more we learn about what computers can do and how life works,

the closer we get to creating the first machine that fits our description of life,

the more our image of ourselves is in danger again.

if everything in the universe is made of the same stuff,

does this mean everything in the universe is dead

or that everything in the universe is alive?

because we were never alive in the first place?

Is life and death an irrelevant question and we haven't noticed it yet?

Is it possible we are much more part of the universe around us than we thought?

Don't look at us; we don't have any answers for you.

After all, it's thinking about questions like this that makes us feel alive