Is Fire Alive?

This is an inside joke for biologists because fire meets most, but not all requirements of standard Earth life as we know it.

• Responsiveness to the environment? (if you poke it, it will spark.)
• Growth and change? (If you feed it, it will grow.)
• Ability to reproduce? (If you light a torch, it will burn separately even after the main source has burnt out, so technically that counts.)
• Have a metabolism and breathe? (It does utilize oxygen and burn fuel.)
• Maintain homeostasis? (This is the kicker, since it’s technically defined as “the tendency toward a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements, especially as maintained by physiological processes.” And here’s where it gets tricky. “physiological” is defined as “relating to the branch of biology that deals with the normal functions of living organisms and their parts,” which is funny because we’re debating whether this is a living organism here. So this one’s moot until we prove life. )
• Being made of cells? (OK, fire is not made of cell bubbles of water. That would be counter-intuitive for fire. But wait, there’s more! A cell is defined as “the smallest structural and functional unit of an organism,” so a plasma organism made of an oxidation reaction would be composed of fundamental units just like anything else in the universe. It’s a very general definition. So this actually could qualify, surprising as it seems.)
• Passing traits onto offspring? (This one seems impossible, yet also obvious since all fire is basically the same emission but did you know there are different kinds of fire? Of course fire appears identical to the untrained eye but a trained firefighter can tell what might have started a burn, how it might be fueled and how oxygenated it is at a glance. Burning wet fuel like fresh leaves on top can produce more smoke for smoke signals. And hey, now you learned something useful if you want to communicate from across a mountain or in an emergency situation.)

Every Chemistry Lover Has a Favorite Flame.

Now that we’ve had our fun, let’s say it’s technically not “alive” so why is this topic important? Because, as many a science fiction demonstrates time and time again, we have only just begun to understand our own life forms in and around us made of the same DNA as us. Life can exist in a potentially infinite number of ways, as we have already discovered ways to craft new materials into synthetic DNA and construct entirely new forms of life. There is no doubt that, at our current pace, we will have to expand our definition of life given our current progress. Logically, that trend would continue indefinitely, if not slowly, until we are capable of granting the attributes of life to virtually any known form of being. Now whether we actually do so is up to time and people like you, reading this right now. What will you teach your kids? How will those lessons influence how we react to inevitable new discoveries in the future?