If we seeded a planet with sufficiently advanced robots, that can mine and build and learn and make copies of themselves on their own, and a few centuries later they have a civilization, does it matter what they're made of?
For all intents and purposes, it would be life.
Perhaps at some point we should/will have to stop saying "life" at some point and use terms like "agent" instead, to include disembodied intelligences shaping the universe through their decisions and stuff like that. :)
Well then if you found a place with bacteria but nothing advanced you would put in your captain's log that "the fundamental requirements for agency to arise were found, but as yet agency had not been achieved" or some such phrasing.
If we seeded a planet with sufficiently advanced robots, that can mine and build and learn and make copies of themselves on their own, and a few centuries later they have a civilization, does it matter what they're made of?
For all intents and purposes, it would be life.
Perhaps at some point we should/will have to stop saying "life" at some point and use terms like "agent" instead, to include disembodied intelligences shaping the universe through their decisions and stuff like that. :)