>>11661377Let me clarify myself. When I say that life is a process of energy manipulation, I mean two things.
First, energy manipulation is a fundamental principle/tendency of alive organisms. That is, they manipulate energy for the sake of manipulating energy. Any biological system that is able to sustain the process of energy manipulation on its own is alive; this is the lower limit . Thus, a lipid membrane does count as alive. I am not sure I could say the same about proteins and DNA--which in turn includes viruses. I would be inclined to say that virus have the potential of living,i.e., partake in the process of energy manipulation. If pushed harder, I would probably also say that they are alive in a passive way.
Energy manipulation is not an exclusive feature of biological systems. A computer, for example, partakes in energy manipulation but that does not mean it is alive because this is not its ultimate goal. The goal of a computer, as designed by humans, is to compute; not to manipulate energy for the sake of it.
Second, since life is "defined" (in the loose sense) as some sort of process, it means that it has a beginning and an end. Any discontinuity effectuates the irreversible end of a process; death. Obviously, immortal organisms are still considered alive,but they can still die. That happens when the rate of damage is higher than that of repair due to external factors(predators and disease).
