Are planets living organisms?

[ultraviolet]

And put back in spelling tests. They would do some people (me) a world of good. -.-;;;

Spelling tests are easy enough to set for yourself; find a handful of words you fail at and write them down daily on a scrap of paper or in a notebook, then go and check if they're right. If one iswrong, write the correct spelling next to it and look over it. And then do it the next day until you learn to spell them. It's memorizing the pattern of letters.
Once you can spell all the words on your list, find a couple more that you can't spell.

/offtopic

planets certainly aren't organisms. o.O I mean, not only has this been disproved already by a few people but I don't think anyone's mentioned gas planets yet, and I don't see any conceivable way of them being alive.

 

[Autumn]

Moreso than spelling, I could've used penmanship lessons in my primary school. What makes it worse is that seemingly every school in the country except mine did them. ):

hey, my school didn't

oh wait, I'm not in your country :[

Anyway! I keep wondering if the OP meant to say plants in the title, out of a weird assumption that they didn't fit those seven requirements for being a living organism... for some reason. Planets are most definitely not living, though. o.O

 

[Minish]

Scientifically? Uh... no.

 

[Creasy]

Anyway! I keep wondering if the OP meant to say plants in the title, out of a weird assumption that they didn't fit those seven requirements for being a living organism... for some reason.

No: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

I mean, not only has this been disproved already by a few people

opaltiger and the others have only shown that the Earth doesn't meet one particular operational definition of "life". "Life" can reasonably be defined in other ways.

 

[Tarvos]

err no more than one

 

[opaltiger]

opaltiger and the others have only shown that the Earth doesn't meet one particular operational definition of "life". "Life" can reasonably be defined in other ways.

Can it? Like what?

eta: also note that the Gaia hypothesis doesn't literally state that the Earth is an organism.

 

[Harlequin]

Moreso than spelling, I could've used penmanship lessons in my primary school. What makes it worse is that seemingly every school in the country except mine did them. ):

Yeah, we had those in like ... year three and four. Good times.

 

[glitchedgamer]

Plants preform all the basic life fuctions, therefore they are alive.

 

[Blastoise Fortooate]

No, planets are not alive. Not the ones we know of, at least.

Now, elsewhere in the universe, there might be vaguely planet-shaped balls of who-knows-what that orbit a star and grow and that sort of thing, and that would be cool, and they might be 'alive', but the definition of 'planet' would have to be stretched pretty thin to fit such a creature.

Plants preform all the basic life fuctions, therefore they are alive.

PlanEts, not plants.

 

[ultraviolet]

opaltiger and the others have only shown that the Earth doesn't meet one particular operational definition of "life". "Life" can reasonably be defined in other ways.

please show me a criteria for life that isn't based on science, because that's what 'opaltiger and the others' have used.

also way to ignore my point about gas planets. 8) and most people are using the Earth as an example because it's the only known planet with life. What about other planets? Are they not alive because they don't have any shrubbery or parasites living on them?

 

[Momoharu]

Personally, I don't think the Earth is alive, because it's made out of what I think are nonliving material, rock and metal. However, I think it's a unique sort of thing, because while it doesn't live, other things can live on it.

 

[Creasy]

also way to ignore my point about gas planets. 8) and most people are using the Earth as an example because it's the only known planet with life. What about other planets? Are they not alive because they don't have any shrubbery or parasites living on them?

No sane person would claim that all planets are alive.

please show me a criteria for life that isn't based on science,

Science cannot determine the meaning of a word.

I don't care about this topic, but the definitions used by proponents of the Gaia hypothesis aren't hard to find. I'm mostly just disappointed to see such a clever idea dismissed as beyond consideration.

 

[Zhorken]

The hypothesis is frequently described as viewing the Earth as a single organism.

But I don't see how that's at all what it's actually saying, unless it's talking about Earth as ~the world we live in~ and not the actual planet. Which it doesn't look like it is.

EDIT:

Science cannot determine the meaning of a word.

Then what? Maybe it has a soul? Or are you just saying it's alive in a metaphorical sense? Or...?

I'm mostly just disappointed to see such a clever idea dismissed as beyond consideration.

Which idea? The Gaia hypothesis or the simple "the Earth is alive" we started with? Nobody's dismissed the Gaia hypothesis and the idea that the Earth is alive isn't clever if you have to make up a definition of life for it.

EDIT 2: That's an anonymous, general "you"; my point is the same if you personally took it from someone else who made it up.

 

[opaltiger]

Science cannot determine the meaning of a word.

Cut through the meaningless fluff, please. Life is a scientific term that is defined as exactly as possible given its highly varying nature. Now give me some other definition and maybe we can talk.

I don't care about this topic, but the definitions used by proponents of the Gaia hypothesis aren't hard to find. I'm mostly just disappointed to see such a clever idea dismissed as beyond consideration.

Two points. First, it strikes me that the Gaia hypothesis has been blown way out of proportion. I sincerely doubt any serious scientist would even consider the idea of Earth as a separate organism. But the idea of viewing the biosphere as an organism, i.e. applying the same ecological processes to the entire biosphere as we apply to individual organisms, has a tiny bit more merit, and I believe something in that direction is what its proponents intended. That is not to say that the Earth is a living organism; it is to say that the Earth can be viewed in terms of the same processes that we apply to living organisms. If you want to call that life, fine, but don't expect to convince anyone that Earth is alive when your first step is to redefine life.

Second, I think we can draw (based on my admittedly limited knowledge) an analogy to evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is a fascinating field in terms of the areas studies - for example, is there an evolutionary explanation for gender roles in humans? Such questions are very interesting to work on, and possible answers provide an interesting exercise in applying evolutionary theory, but that is all they are: possible answers. To a very large extent (there has been some interesting research done in the field) evolutionary psychology is an exercise in thought experiments. It provides no testable hypotheses, makes no predictions; all it does is postulate possible explanations of a phenomenon. I think the situation with the Gaia hypothesis is the same: it is all very interesting from a philosophical perspective, but scientifically it is useless.

 

[Eta Carinae]

Earth: No

Undiscovered Planets: Possibly

A living planet is entirely possible in my mind, simply because of the fact that humans do not have knowledge of everything in the universe. No-one could (truthfully) say that there was no planet in the universe that was also a living thing unless they were knowing of every single world, which nobody is. But Earth, definitely not.

 

[opaltiger]

It is impossible for any planet to be living for the following reasons.

Life is complicated. This is something we cannot deny; the processes we know as life simply cannot occur without some pretty elaborate machinery (again, we could redefine life, but that would be silly). I don't think it matters whether we are talking carbon-based or silicon-based or hydrogen-based. Life is, inherently, a gradient from less to more complicated. It reduces disorder.

So, life is complicated. I think it isn't a stretch to say that, for life to develop, we need some sort of suitable environment - the vacuum of space really doesn't the provide the kind of situation needed for any interesting chemical reactions to occur, much less organic ones.

So we need an environment. Pretty much the only environment I can think of would be some kind of celestial body - a planet, a moon, an asteroid, a comet (a bit unlikely, this), whatever. Now we have set the stage for life, and perhaps it will develop and evolve. But how do you propose that this life which has evolved on a planet take to the skies and become a planet? From an evolutionary standpoint I simply cannot imagine a situation in which an organism could transition from living on a planet to living as a planet. Add to this the fact that such organisms would have to be incredibly rare (or else we would observe large clumps of planets, all close enough to the sun to derive energy from it), and their existence can be all but certainly ruled out.

 

[Erif]

Planets aren't living, and nor is Earth; it just contains and maintains life.

 

[Ether's Bane]

Not all of them are, but the Earth, as it is right now, can be classified as a superorganism - arguably.

@Metallica Fanboy: This is what I was thinking when I made this thread.

 

[opaltiger]

No it can't! Superorganisms (e.g. ant colonies) act together towards some common goal. A superorganism in which half the individuals want to eat the other half doesn't make sense.

 

[M&F]

No it can't! Superorganisms (e.g. ant colonies) act together towards some common goal. A superorganism in which half the individuals want to eat the other half doesn't make sense.

However, if you think about it, things would be worse if individuals didn't want to eat each other.

I've seen this mentioned often in my Biology classes. By predating, living creatures stop each other from overpopulating. When a species overpopulates, that tends to cause them to not only get themselves extinct (at least from the area that got overpopulated), but also get a few more species down along the way.

I still have a hard time thinking of Earth as a superorganism, but...