I was having a conversation last night with a few friends at work and the subject of what constitutes something "being alive" came up. There was a discussion of the paranormal, but what really riveted our attention was talking about the subatomic realm of particles. The question raised but unanswered was, "Are particles alive?"
When NASA sent the Rovers Spirit and Opportunity to Mars, the primary goal was to find any evidence of the one element that is responsible for life as we know it on Earth, water. That search proved fruitful and I think it is now fact that while water may not exist on Mars now, remnants of the existence of water have been found proving at least that water used to exist on Mars. The question of water (life) on Mars was of course part of a bigger question about life elsewhere in the entire universe. But maybe we have already found more life in the universe and we just don't realize it.
At the quantum level, the smallest unit seems to be the particle; a particle is smaller than an atom. The word quantum means "the least quantity of evidence," which is consistent with the size of a particle. An underlying and mysterious principle of quantum physics is that the observer seems to affect the outcome of an experiment. At the normal level of physics the outcome of an observed phenomenon doesn't seem to be affected by our observation. A given experiment can be repeated many, many times and the same result occurs. Not so at the quantum level, or smallest level of physics. In experiments with particles, the particle(s) will behave one way with a given experiment, but when the experiment is repeated continually and exactly the particle(s) behave differently each time, and seemingly at random. Scientists simply don't understand why particles behave this way. One logical question that arises is, "Do the particles know that they are being observed and purposely change their behavior to confuse the observer?" The next questions of course are, "If so, how do they know?" And, "If they do know, does that mean that particles are actually intelligent?" And, "If they are intelligent, does that mean that particles are alive?"
If the answer turns out to be that particles have intelligence and are, in fact, alive, then perhaps we have made a preliminary discovery that there is indeed intelligent life abundant in the universe. It's just not quite the kind of life that we were expecting!
