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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.



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