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Interesting question about whether life can exist indefinitely far in the future. A related question my colleague Paul Davies always asks is how much of the universe could be converted to life – you need to have free energy available to fuel it, so not every bit of matter could be part of life, but how much? Is there a fundamental bound? With regard to the question of how far into the future the well-known physicist Freeman Dyson once tried to do a calculation based on the idea of life being analog and running on slower and slower metabolism as the universe expanded and his claim was that life could exist infinitely far in the future in an expanding universe if it could run ever slower. These thought experiments can give some insight into how to refine our questions.
Some interesting points here! I am curious … why would you want your definition to exclude computers or technology? Is that based on logical considerations or your prior belief about what life is? (It is important always to consider what are our biases versus what are the concrete arguments we can make)
This raises the important point of where we draw a “boundary” around what we call life. For example, a DNA strand cannot independently reproduce but we are ok with it being part of life. With a virus, many are not comfortable saying it is life because it is not independent, but if you consider a virus + host cell as the relevant scale for thinking about life it could be included. How does your definition change if you think about different systems?
The discussion on homeostasis is moving in an interesting direction, it seems that it is clear from the points made there is not a set temperature range for life, but perhaps the more important observation is that life is capable of maintaining its internal temperature range (is homeostatic) – is this a start for a definition for life?