At what point of engineering does an organism pass from being a "life
as we know it" to being a machine?
i.e. If a microorganism were engineered that ate CO2 and aluminum and
encased itself in a metal-plastic (e.g. metallized mylar) bubble it's
pretty conceivable it would still be considered and organism. If they
were programmed with a type of quorum sensing that caused touching
bubbles to coalesce and a critical mass of bubbles to rupture entirely
I have trouble thinking of them as just microorganisms. If they used a
process more akin to photovoltaics than to photosynthesis to collect
the energy necessary to make these bubbles or collapsed the bubbles to
form metal endospores, I'm pretty sure they'd be considered robots at
that point. But if they still used lipid bilayers and a water-based
solvent system, I can easily see a case for considering them as life
too.
If we were going to 'reenact' the Oxygen Catastrophe on Mars, life on
Earth is going to have to do some things that life on Earth has never
done before.
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