What is life? I have the answer! Really. And I'm not a biologist. I suppose I consider myself a small philosopher, a microphilosopher to use the greek. I have pondered the great questions, and indeed I have some answers! So what is life?

Many people consider life a mystery. I don't think life is a mystery at all. I think life is the most natural and inescapable result of their being space, time and matter. Here's how.

10 million or however many years ago we have a pool of chemicals on the Earth. Why the earth? Because it's at the right temperature for water to stay in liquid form. Where do all the chemicals come from? Well, I don't know, but I said we needed space, time and matter. Actually, scrap time, time is probably just illusion. We need space and matter.

Anyway, in this pool of chemicals on the earth, chemical reactions take place to produce other chemicals. Randomly.

Some chemical reactions produce stable results, and those results persist, because they are stable. Some produce less stable results, and they deteriorate, because they are unstable.

This is the essence of life. Stable combinations of matter persist, simply because they are stable. Unstable combinations of matter deteriorate, simply because they are unstable.

At some stage, a special thing happens. Amongst the pool of chemicals, amongst the myriad chemical reactions taking place as chemicals blindly interact, a type of chemical forms which has the ability to reproduce. This is special but by no means mysterious. It's simply a configuration of matter which combines with more matter in such a way that it molds other matter into it's own shape. Then the matter splits. Reproduction is born.

Matter which reproduces is the ultimate stable configuration. It will persist indefinitaly consuming it's environment, converting it's surroundings into copies of itself. Life as we know it is born.

Fast forward to now and ages of reproduction and mutation have produced the vast array of natural living wonder we behold including ourselves.

So, that about wraps it up for life. Now, awareness, there's a real mystery.