top of page
kwanlchan

Plant life

Updated: Apr 3, 2022

Where did life come from?


As a teenager living in an age without internet, I could only think about this question in terms of direct and indirect experiences. What constituted life? An entity had life if it could move around. Was it correct? Perhaps not, as plants could not move around but it had life. So, what then distinguished life from non-life? Was it consciousness? Again, it was not a satisfactory answer. I could not tell whether a plant had consciousness or not.


I considered plant life anyway. Plants, in most cases, did not move like animals. However, they did move: they grew bigger, their roots extended to get water, and they might orient their leaves to face the sun. How did they learn all these skills? Who taught them?


Perhaps there was a more important question to consider. Most of what I knew about the movement of plants was that such movement was beneficial to them. The roots route themselves to reach water, the leaves open to more sunlight, and the plant's life flourish. These movements suggested that the plants had a desire to live. But did plants really experience this desire? They were just plants after all! If it was not their desire to live, then whose desire was it?


I am not an expert on evolution, even less so now than when I was a teen. However, it just seemed too strange to me that mindless atoms or chemicals could by chance meet and create life, that not only empowered them the ability to move, and even give them a desire to live!


Somehow when I thought about non-life, I thought about the refrigerator. Could a non-life object, like the refrigerator, somehow turned into a living object, moved around to satisfy the desire to live? No, it was just too fantastical to me.



66 views4 comments

Recent Posts

See All

4 comentarios


Kevin Jiang
Kevin Jiang
29 abr 2022

What constitutes a living organism is a question I also find myself pondering often. Especially as of recent. Ive also began to ponder the idea of consciousness and what dictates whether Im inhabiting this physical body and not another. Whether it's supernatural, extra-dimensional or grounded in the material world. Thus far Ive made a few assumptions that I think make sense to me. If we assert that consciousness is of the material world such that it cannot be created nor destroyed then it is likely also adhering to some law of conservation and must be constantly recycled. (In this case we can view what dictates whether im in this body or the next as some particle, energy, etc.) If this…

Me gusta
Kevin Jiang
Kevin Jiang
29 abr 2022
Contestando a

I am actually really happy to get a response. Thanks you very much. 🙂🙂🙂🙂 Just to clarify, I simply use "they" to describe god becuase it's difficult to describe god otherwise, they are referred to as the trinity, three yet one and so on. Im not entirely sure what god is and so I refer to god as "they." I also fully understand that my many guesses and assumptions are based off of assertions, but I dont completely believe that should discredit all of them. Even our belief that the speed of light is constant in all directions is simply an assertion made by Einstein. Infact it is impossible to measure the speed of light in one direction with our current knowledge…

Me gusta

2C17 CHAN PAK MING
2C17 CHAN PAK MING
08 abr 2022

For me I think the aliens or something come from the space created life.Also the things that humans called non-life maybe it can be turned into life too , just human don't know how to do .

Me gusta
bottom of page