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Anatoly_Vorobey comments on Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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The precise definition of life will not be the thing that will determine our opinion about possible extraterrestrial life when we come across it. It will matter whether that hypothetical life is capable of growth, change, producing offspring, heredity, communication, intelligence, etc. etc. - all of these things will matter a lot. Having a very specific subset of these enshrined as "the definition of life" will not matter. This is what Popper's quote is all about.
It's possible that extraterrestrial life will be nothing but a soup of RNA molecules. If we visit a planet while its life is still in the embryonic stages, we need to include that in our discourse of life in general. We need to have a word to represent what we are talking about when we talk about it. That's the only purpose any definition ever serves. If you want to go down the route of 'the definition of life is useless', you might as well just say 'all definitions are useless'.