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[Maximum Spin]

I guess it's a question of the line between "dormant" versus "dead"... or "unalive."

The question was prompted while eating an apple today - the apple, when not attached to its tree...is it alive?  At what point does a vegetable cease being alive and just...something else? Or are plants oddities and they remain alive, simply transitioning from "good vegetable" to "vegetable with lots of non-vegetable growth" until it turns into an organic mass that no longer metabolizes?

(Oddly enough, I'm not even under the influence of anything... got myself into a weird loop.)

"Alive" has a pretty straightforward biological definition. There are blurry edges (don't ask about viruses), but that isn't one of them at all.
"Dormant" is still alive. Viable seeds are alive. Individual cells - even in animals! - may stay alive for weeks after the organism dies or is detached. And, of course, a dead thing may still have lots of other living things growing on it and extracting what's left of its structured energy.

[Il Palazzo]

If it's such a straightforward a definition, why not state it instead of teasing us so? Myself, I haven't yet seen one that would not need to handwave some exceptions.

[dragdeler]

Well I like firefox but I had reasons to be a little suspicious, I observed some more and now I'm less suspicious it's weird that win10 counts the data of literally the last 30 days, and not starting the 1st, that's all I'll say.


The seed is information, I've heard that particularly as it pertains to apples, the variation is too big to expect the offspring to be paletable, so apparantly allmost all apples come from clones.

The apple itself is slowly dying I guess. The cells are still alive and struggling against entropy while starving. I wonder if they also fall just because the tree stops sending juices, or if they have like a hardcoded limit.

The seed, hm, ever heard of people they found frozen solid and managed to revive? For the seeds it's less of a temperature bound state of "pause" than chemically bound. Seeds have been shown to sprout after hundred or even thousands of years for certain species. But for that they need to be kept in the right conditions which usually involves being kept dry. Where they to come in contact with moisture but too little of it, and then nothing, they would try to run the program they have encoded into themselves, and start slowly dying, at which point we can unambigously say that they were alive.

Talking about information in this context is not weaseling around the question IMO, how much genetic material do we share with our closest relatives, was it more than 90, 95 or 98%... too lazy to look it up but it's pretty high. It is the information that is essential not the pedigree.

[Maximum Spin]

If it's such a straightforward a definition, why not state it instead of teasing us so? Myself, I haven't yet seen one that would not need to handwave some exceptions.

I wasn't trying to tease, I just thought it was obvious from what I said. "Alive", at least in this context, means actively metabolizing. If it's using energy to maintain its state against entropy, it's alive. An apple on the tree, then, is alive; an apple in your hand is either quickly burning through its energy reserves for a brief period or already dead and slowly decaying. A seed, including the seeds in the apple, comes with enough energy reserves to keep it alive for a reasonably long time as long as it remains in stable conditions where the decay it has to fight against is slight enough.

I wonder if they also fall just because the tree stops sending juices, or if they have like a hardcoded limit.

Sorry, didn't see this question - the detachment is "programmed". There are two main ways plants do this and I don't know which the apple uses, but most likely either the cells in the stem spontaneously release enzymes that break down the attachment between them, or those cells self-destruct by bursting, leaving a small gap.

[Eric Blank]

I guess it's a question of the line between "dormant" versus "dead"... or "unalive."

The question was prompted while eating an apple today - the apple, when not attached to its tree...is it alive?  At what point does a vegetable cease being alive and just...something else? Or are plants oddities and they remain alive, simply transitioning from "good vegetable" to "vegetable with lots of non-vegetable growth" until it turns into an organic mass that no longer metabolizes?

(Oddly enough, I'm not even under the influence of anything... got myself into a weird loop.)

To muddy up the waters, there is a species of diatomic algae (my Google fu is failing me but I read about it a couple years ago on a science journal site) that allows itself to completely dry out, then come back to life when water is restored. The kicker is, when it dries out, it's chromosomes fall apart and then recombine when it rehydrates. This simulates sexual reproduction enough that the species, despite only reproducing asexually, has been around for millions of years. Usually asexually reproducing organisms either go extinct or change sufficiently to be a(or many) different species over generations.

Now, considering that it completely ceases all cellular function so much so that its chromosomes break down, and then revives with differently-arranged chromosomes, does that qualify as the same organism? Is it technically a different life, or the same living thing resurrected? Is it undead or newly born from its parents corpse?

[Il Palazzo]

I wasn't trying to tease, I just thought it was obvious from what I said. "Alive", at least in this context, means actively metabolizing. If it's using energy to maintain its state against entropy, it's alive. An apple on the tree, then, is alive; an apple in your hand is either quickly burning through its energy reserves for a brief period or already dead and slowly decaying. A seed, including the seeds in the apple, comes with enough energy reserves to keep it alive for a reasonably long time as long as it remains in stable conditions where the decay it has to fight against is slight enough.

Are dormant bacteria (un)dead then?

[Maximum Spin]

Are dormant bacteria (un)dead then?

Of course they're alive, as they're still metabolizing. Metabolizing very slowly and conservatively is still metabolizing. The bacterium is still maintaining itself in a coherent state against entropy - if it weren't, it couldn't "wake up" again.

This isn't really something where you can find grey areas - something is dead when entropy has destroyed its coherence. There's no coming back from that. It's the second rule of thermodynamics. For example, individual cells are generally dead when their outer membranes have been lysed and all the juicy insides have spilled out. Living cells actively maintain their membranes against decay to the extent that they are able (and when unable, they die).

[Il Palazzo]

Are the dormant bacteria really metabolising, though? Isn't bacterial dormancy defined by metabolic inactivity?
I'm not being cheeky here - it's what I understood it to mean. I could probably google up some papers that talk in those terms. But I'm an ignoramus so might be missing a lot of nuance here (like, oh, we meant 'inactivity', not inactivity; or something).

[Maximum Spin]

Are the dormant bacteria really metabolising, though? Isn't bacterial dormancy defined by metabolic inactivity?
I'm not being cheeky here - it's what I understood it to mean. I could probably google up some papers that talk in those terms. But I'm an ignoramus so might be missing a lot of nuance here (like, oh, we meant 'inactivity', not inactivity; or something).

It's basically "'inactivity', not inactivity", yes. It always takes energy to maintain the coherence of an organism against the environment. Some bacteria can form endospores that minimise the energy expenditure almost completely - to the point that, for example, they stop repairing their DNA, which will fall apart, causing them to die, eventually, so there's an absolute limit on the amount of time they can spend that way - but that level of absolute stasis is relatively rare.
Now, I should add here that a lot of what things like "ancient bacteria" found trapped in sediment are actually doing, we don't know. But we can tell they're doing SOMETHING because their DNA, cell walls, organelles, and stuff aren't all ruined. It's also not totally clear what's going on in endospores, except we do know they are packed with a chemical that is probably some kind of DNA preservative.

I guess I'd accept the argument that endospores could be considered "neither alive nor dead", but to me, it makes more sense to consider them in the "alive, but slowly dying" category. If they don't exit the spore state and start maintaining themselves fully again, they die.

[Travis Bickle]

Tell me alternate firefox clients (like waterfox) and why you use them, is there anything you dont like about them?

LibreWolf is pretty good and is basically just Firefox with the security hardening done for you and uBlock Origin preinstalled. Probably the easiest choice.
GNU IceCat is theoretically better but the obsessive commitment to removing anything proprietary or spyware renders most of the modern web completely unusable without tweaking. It also hasn't been actively maintained in years.
I've heard that Parabola Iceweasel is basically GNU IceCat, but actually good. I haven't actually tested it myself, though.

It should go without saying but if you get a more privacy-centered version of Firefox and are still using Windows, you're doing it wrong.

[scriver]

so did it kinda die and then bring itself back to life?

That is not dead which can eternal lie

[Great Order]

Anyone remember a film where a guy's repeatedly travelling back in time to stop a terrorist attack on a train? He's in some small sphere or something, and it's revealed he's actually a limbless torso and the sphere's a construct. All I remember aside is that he asks to be killed and they agree, but then instead once he's completed the mission they decide to wipe his mind instead, but he goes back one last time and fixes the life of the guy he's been hijacking which, somehow, lets him continue living as that guy instead.

[Il Palazzo]

Source Code with Jake Gyllenhaal

[Great Order]

Yup, that's the one, thanks.

[scriver]

But what about the hijacked guy