WHAT DO YOU MEAN VIRUSES ARE NON-LIVING??
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@farah They are kind of at the border between living and not living:
- They don’t eat and poop, not even eating sunlight and pooping O2 like plants.
- They cannot reproduce without being in a host cell.
- But they can move.
- I think they have something like primitive chemical senses that also single-cell organisms have but not sure.
- What was the fifths sign of life again?
Scientists/doctors don’t say a virus is dead, they say inactive.
@farah There are things that are less alive than viruses but still a little bit alive: prions. The ones that cause mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jacob
@farah That's one of those fun ones that kind of lives in a Venn diagram of like biology and philosophy.
@farah old stringent definition of life. Since then they’ve learned more and i don’t think it’s clear cut now
@Kierkegaanks @farah i like that we’ve thought about it a lot and now we know less
@ptoothfish @Kierkegaanks @farah
You call this “living”?
@glasspusher @ptoothfish @Kierkegaanks Did a virus write this?
@ptoothfish @Kierkegaanks We can say the same about space too I guess
