One secrecy of Life.
One secrecy of Life.
On one of those reflective days in 2015, it came to my mind that – maybe – during this year a baby would be born that, once as an adult, would become the first human to put his/her footprint on our neighbouring planet Mars, searching for clear evidence of life – past or present.
And then I started wondering about how life on Earth might have come about...
Definition of Life.
To find a proper definition of life is tougher than I first thought. Consulting scientific sources gave me a vast amount of definitions, but all of them were challenged by peers. So, for the objective of this small article, let's not waste too much time on this and let us accept the following simple description of life:
"Life is a dynamic process, concealed in a closed unit (cell) that transforms energy and matter via self-sustaining chemical and physical activity in order to be able to increase in biomass, to constantly interact with its environment and to reproduce itself in an autonomous way – all this together, called metabolism".
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The milestone for the concept of cybernetics started with a series of legendary meetings in New York, known as “the Macy Conference”. These meetings – and especially the first one, in 1946 – were extraordinary, stimulating and joined an exceptional group of highly creative people who collided against each other during intensive interdisciplinary dialogues about new ideas and ways of thinking. The participants divided themselves into two main groups. The first one was formed around the original cybernetics and included mathematicians, engineers and neuroscientists. The second group was formed around human scientists who were led by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead.