01 欢迎参与我们这个时代最重要的对话

The question of how to define life is notoriously controversial.Competing definitions abound,some of which include highly specific requirements such as being composed of cells,which might disqualify both future intelli-gent machines and extraterrestrial civilizations. Since we don't want to limit our thinking about the future of life to the species we've encoutered so far, let's instead define life very broadly,simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate. What's replicated isn't matter (made of atoms) but information (made of bits) specifying how the atoms are arranged.When a bacterium makes a copy of its DNA,no new atoms are created, but a new set of atoms are arranged in the same pattern as theoriginal, thereby copying the information. In other words,we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.
Obviously, 原文中作者并没有加粗这句话，就是关于生命的定义方式，也即他并不是很注意这一点。define broadly like this只是为了方便讨论吧