Could objects like stars be considered living?

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨sbeak@sopuli.xyz⁩ to ⁨science@mander.xyz⁩

Often, we call the stages of a star its “life cycle”, and I’ve been thinking about this for a bit.

Stars meet many of the requirements for living organisms: they can consume matter, they can react to stimuli (sort of, does gravity count? e.g. binary systems), they can reproduce (they expel gas clouds on death that can eventually create new stars), they can grow and change size over their lifespan, and they maintain equilibrium (between gravity and radiation pressure from fusion)

What stops stars from being considered living objects?

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frongt@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
They don’t react to stimuli like gravity any more than a completely inanimate object.

They also don’t reproduce. Dying and reforming is not reproduction. I’m not aware of anything already considered living that will die and reanimate.

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tangeli@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
You’re already considering it, so the trivial answer is: yes.

The harder questions are: what do you mean by living? What do other people mean or understand by living? How does any particular definition of living help someone understand, communicate about and predict events?

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AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
My personal definition of life includes the propagation of latent information—meaning that a “child” inherits something from its “parent” that isn’t visible to an observer but that nevertheless affects its potential behavior.

Assuming we can see the size and chemical composition of the gas cloud out of which a star condenses, our current theory is that this completely determines the future behavior of the star. If that’s so, then the star wouldn’t be alive by my definition. But if there’s some unobservable quality that the star inherits from its parent and that does affect its behavior, I’d be willing to reconsider.

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atzanteol@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
No.

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