This may be more of an idea from computer science, but information may help us study life. If we can understand how life processes and interacts with information, such as the molecular interactions in its chemicals or the information of neural impulses in the brain, we can differentiate it from how non living things do the same, fire for example, changes information (taking some complex structure and burning it reduces its complexity), but the way a fire interacts with and processes information is very different to how life forms process it. Moreover, in the case of chirality, that was brought up in the video, couldn’t the symmetry breaking simply result from evolution. For example, enzymes catalyse the amino acids and molecules to form proteins. Perhaps it simply took more energy or was less efficient to create enzymes that catalysed reactions with a certain kind of chiral particle (such as right handed), the cells containing enzymes that catalysed reactions for certain more efficient molecules surviving as a consequence of Darwinian Evolution (the less efficient or more energy demanding would die off).

Personally, I believe that there cannot be an equivalent law of conservation applied to life because it is possible to convert from a living system into a nonliving system; this happens naturally as living organisms age and eventually can no longer sustain themselves, which agrees with the Second Law of Thermodynamics that the entropy of the universe increases over time (as Rudolf Clausius once said, death ultimately prevails over life). Similarly, the video lecture discussed how life has an inherent asymmetry in the predominance of one chiral form of certain biomolecules over the other. I find this idea to be particularly intriguing and wonder if it would be possible to construct different life forms using the other set of oriented molecules.

I agree with Pritvik’s conjecture that the symmetry breaking could be a result of evolution, where the biochemical processes that required less energy and occurred more efficiently were the ones that prevailed. However, this claim does not necessarily rule out the possibility of creating alternate life forms with the less stable molecules. Certainly, the structurally assembled organism may itself be unstable since more energy is required to sustain it, but wouldn’t we still be able to classify it as living?