ArticleLife (Basel, Switzerland)2020
Defining Lyfe in the Universe: From Three Privileged Functions to Four Pillars.
Article in Life (Basel, Switzerland), 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- The challenge of distinguishing living from non-living entities.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2026Review
- Mapping life's disparity and evolutionary constraints in a geometric complexity space.Science advances · 2026Article
- Discovering sensorimotor agency in cellular automata using diversity search.Science advances · 2025Article
- Towards origins of virtual artificial life: an overview.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Origins of life: the possible and the actual.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Life, its origin, and its distribution: a perspective from the Conway-Kochen Theorem and the Free Energy Principle.Communicative & integrative biology · 2025Review
- Alternative Pathways in Astrobiology: Reviewing and Synthesizing Contingency and Non-Biomolecular Origins of Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- The Conformational Contribution to Molecular Complexity and Its Implications for Information Processing in Living Beings and Chemical Artificial Intelligence.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Morphogenetic metasurfaces: unlocking the potential of turing patterns.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Cells as the first data scientists.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- The Origin of Life: What Is the Question?Astrobiology · 2022Article
- The essence of life revisited: how theories can shed light on it.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2022Article
- Searching for Life, Mindful of Lyfe's Possibilities.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening: a possible solution to the Fermi paradox?Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Modeling Virus and Bacteria Populations in Europa's Subsurface Ocean.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Lipid Profiles From Fresh Biofilms Along a Temperature Gradient on a Hydrothermal Stream at El Tatio (Chilean Andes), as a Proxy for the Interpretation of Past and Present Biomarkers Beyond Earth.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
- 'Whole Organism', Systems Biology, and Top-Down Criteria for Evaluating Scenarios for the Origin of Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- The Grayness of the Origin of Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Minimal physicalism as a scale-free substrate for cognition and consciousness.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Motivated by the need to paint a more general picture of what life is-and could be-with respect to the rest of the phenomena of the universe, we propose a new vocabulary for astrobiological research. Lyfe is defined as any system that fulfills all four processes of the living state, namely: dissipation, autocatalysis, homeostasis, and learning. Life is defined as the instance of lyfe that we are familiar with on Earth, one that uses a specific organometallic molecular toolbox to record information about its environment and achieve dynamical order by dissipating certain planetary disequilibria. This new classification system allows the astrobiological community to more clearly define the questions that propel their research-e.g., whether they are developing a historical narrative to explain the origin of life (on Earth), or a universal narrative for the emergence of lyfe, or whether they are seeking signs of life specifically, or lyfe at large across the universe. While the concept of "life as we don't know it" is not new, the four pillars of lyfe offer a novel perspective on the living state that is indifferent to the particular components that might produce it.
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