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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

At some level, if you are capable of being revived, I think your death was prematurely reported, defined by being revived. But, if you are not revived from a quiescent state, now or into the future, is there a functional difference between being quiescent, and being dead?

Down at the viral level, if they crystallise, they're stable. If they managed to get into rock in a crystallised state, how long would they remain stable? Do we define viruses as "not alive" now? or prions? or mitochondria?

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In my understanding, viruses are not alive, they are information gone wrong (for the recipient).

from another understanding, all life is just virus that stumbled on this one weird self replicating trick.

The weird trick that polynucleotides don’t want you to know!

Yes, canonically viruses are not alive.

Though they are close.

We tend to think about life and death as metaphysical states, but life is really just a process. And death the absence of that process.

Or actually, life is a bunch of different processes. It's possible for some to stop while others continue. Some, if stopped, can be restarted again, others can't. It all depends on whether the systems supporting those processes survive is a useable state. Often they deteriorate without the metabolical processes, but some systems are stable enough to survive a long time without the processes that maintain them so the processes can be restarted.

So are you dead when the processes stop, or when the system has deteriorated to the point they can't be restarted?

I like your take. Agree that we should label something as 'alive' when there are active biological processes happening; and 'dead' in the absence of any. Also, just get rid of the idea that you're not allowed to move between the 2 extremes; or even that you can't be on some spectrum between these 2 states; (e.g. zombies)

In an abstract philosophical sense, who knows? But any real organism in the real universe has a finite limit on how long they can be quiescent, so it is fine to say that they're alive until they can no longer be revived, even if that takes hundreds of thousands of years. Death implies irreversible damage.

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