A Message, called Life

What is life?

Now, before you wonder why am I getting all too philosophical, let me tell you that it was a question asked by a chemistry lecturer back in college. In fact, an entire session was spent asking each of the 40-odd students the very same question - what is life?

And here was my answer - life is 'a message' (Sandesh = Message in Sanskrit and most Indian languages). Pun intended. Desperately so!

I was clearly trying to get cheeky, sound intelligent and score some brownie points with the girls around - pardon my nerdy brain - I was called uncle for some reason, I'm sure.

But all that aside, my nerdy brain was also working overtime to understand and explain the science behind that answer.

Picture this - all that information coded into your DNA is actually intended to pass on a 'message' across subsequent generations. How our bodies decode, interpret, express, interact and influence everything around is what we call life, isn't it?

Look at the camels in the picture. They've come a long way. Expressing themselves and leaving a trail behind for someone to follow. That's a message. That's Life.

P.S.
Here's my pet peeve - something that I read in James Lovelock's The Ages of Gaia where he explains how a team of scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) went about designing a mission to find Life in Mars. And here's how the thought process was, apparently:

Mars is like a desert >> there'll be camels in a desert >> there'll be fleas on a camel >> So let's build a flea detector to detect life on Mars!

Reductionism, at it's best. No wonder, the quest is still on. ;)