Would an organism that lives for millions or hundreds of millions of years detect our momentary flash?
Our lives (and civilization) are incredibly short on a universal time frame. This is very cool - we are the fastest creators of complexity and order we know of. We are a piece of the universe that has become sentient; (arguably) the only part capable of choosing whether to grow or die.
Our understanding of life is inherently limited by our context; an enormous tree is nearly alien yet it is very closely related to us. At a philosophical level we can begin to assess the basic requirements for life: an infrastructure that can store, propagate, modify, and execute code to alter itself and the world around it.
I like that definition. I also tend to define humans as having a large spectrum of scale interactions. We explored and sensed from nanoscopic to cosmic.
Our lives (and civilization) are incredibly short on a universal time frame. This is very cool - we are the fastest creators of complexity and order we know of. We are a piece of the universe that has become sentient; (arguably) the only part capable of choosing whether to grow or die.
Our understanding of life is inherently limited by our context; an enormous tree is nearly alien yet it is very closely related to us. At a philosophical level we can begin to assess the basic requirements for life: an infrastructure that can store, propagate, modify, and execute code to alter itself and the world around it.