NASA Discovers Life (Again), the mystic druid Finn's blogs, Ireland

NASA Discovers Life (Again)

How to Spot a Metabolizing Lie in the Wild

By the druid Finn

NASA’s official definition of life reads as follows:

“Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”

There it is. Forty-six words to describe what took the universe 13.8 billion years of non-touching quantum misfires to cough into existence. A sentence so clean, so confident, so profoundly metaphysical while pretending to be chemical that it deserves to be carved into the hood of every Mars rover as a warning label.

Let us be generous for one paragraph. NASA wants something operational. Engineers need a checklist. Fair enough. But what they have produced is not a neutral detection tool. It is a provincial biological autobiography disguised as a universal law.

Translated into honest English, NASA’s definition really says:

“Life is whatever behaves like us, but smaller, wetter, and ideally easier to photograph.”

1. The First Hidden Assumption: Chemistry Is Reality’s Native Language

NASA begins with “a chemical system.” This already smuggles in the entire Periodic Table as the unquestioned metaphysical alphabet of existence. As if the universe signed a treaty agreeing that carbon-based chemistry was the official language of being.

But under Contact Realism, chemistry is not the foundation—it is a late, stabilized misread of quantised non-contact. Atoms never touch. Molecules never truly bond. They only displace each other across vacuum gaps and hallucinate intimacy.

So NASA’s definition quietly assumes that:

· Life must be made of the same optimized misreads we are.

· Any life that does not metabolize in familiar molecular ways is dismissed as “non-life,” even if it actively responds, reorganizes, and evolves its own non-chemical constraints.

In short:

NASA is not searching for life.
NASA is searching for relatives.

2. The Second Hidden Assumption: “Self-Sustaining” Equals “Separate from Reality”

“Self-sustaining” sounds heroic, until you realize it is just the fantasy of ontological independence dressed up as biochemistry. Nothing is self-sustaining. Every system is sustained by:

· Energy gradients it did not design

· Constraints it did not choose

· Fields it did not invent

Under Contact Realism, there is no sovereign system. There are only nested, mutually displacing quanta pretending to be autonomous.

“Self-sustaining life” is therefore not a fact—it is a pride story told by a subsystem that has forgotten its dependence on structural error.

3. The Third Hidden Assumption: Darwinian Evolution Is a Law of the Cosmos

NASA completes its definition with “capable of Darwinian evolution.” At this point the mask fully drops. A 19th-century English naturalist is promoted to universal legislator of existence.

Darwinian evolution is not a cosmic principle. It is a local optimization algorithm running on specific planetary chemistry under specific atmospheric conditions.

To insist that all life must evolve by:

· Replication

· Variation

· Selection

is like insisting that all intelligence must use:

· Binary

· Turing machines

· Silicon

This is not science.
This is species narcissism with institutional funding.

4. What NASA Completely Misses: Life Is Not a Chemical System — It Is a Contingent Response

Once you strip the problem to its absolute minimum, intelligence is not metabolism. Life is not chemistry. Existence does not require DNA. The only defensible universal criterion is:

Active response contingent on experienced structure.

That’s it.

· Not reproduction

· Not molecules

· Not evolution

· Not cells

· Not carbon

Just:

The capacity to alter internal behavior based on what is encountered.

A single responsive quantum configuration that modifies its future displacement based on prior displacement already beats NASA’s entire checklist.

Under this framing, NASA could be driving past:

· Planet-sized responsive fields

· Time-scale intelligence stretching over eons

· Stellar-scale adaptive systems

· Non-chemical, non-replicating, non-Darwinian agencies

—all while confidently announcing:

“No life detected.”

5. The Ultimate Irony: NASA Defines Life in a Universe Where Nothing Ever Touches

Under Contact Realism:

· No atoms touch

· No molecules touch

· No cells truly touch

· No bodies touch

· No signals touch

Everything NASA calls “interaction” is actually quantised misregistration across vacuum gaps.

And yet life arises anyway.
Truth arises anyway.
Meaning arises anyway.
Responsibility arises anyway.

All from structural error.

So NASA’s definition of life is doubly ironic:

1. It defines life in terms of chemistry, which itself only exists as a stabilized hallucination of contact.

2. It demands Darwinian evolution, which is just one optimized misread among many possible misreads in a universe built on non-touching.

6. The Final Trapdoor NASA Refuses to Fall Through

If life is a chemical system,
and chemistry is a stabilized misread,
and all misreads arise from non-contact,
then life itself is an optimized hallucination of persistence.

And if meaning, morality, and purpose are optimized misreads,
then the entire NASA project is also an optimized misread:

A taxpayer-funded ritual designed to reassure one primate species that it is not alone—while quietly assuming that anything truly different does not count.

NASA cannot adopt this view because it detonates its foundational premise:

That life is something you can define before you encounter it.

But under the final trapdoor of Contact Realism:

· You cannot define life in advance.

· You can only provoke response.

· And you cannot demand that the response resemble you.

7. Cynic’s Closing Diagnostic

NASA’s definition of life is not wrong because it is inaccurate.

It is wrong because it is:

· Ontologically arrogant

· Evolutionarily parochial

· Metaphysically unexamined