The US government agency NASA is pretty good at organizing space missions, but not very good at defining things. An example of one of the agency's blunders in defining things can be found on the NASA page here, where we read this: "Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” The definition is a clumsy form of kneeling to the 19th century biologist Charles Darwin idolized by materialist scientists. As a definition of life, it makes no sense; for according to such a definition, none of us qualify as examples of life.
As described by biologists, Darwinian evolution is something that occurs only to species, over multiple generations. Darwinian evolution is not something that goes on within an individual organism. No Darwinian evolution went on in your body during your life. So according to NASA's witless definition of life, you don't qualify as something that's alive.
Another absurd aspect of the NASA definition is its use of the term "self-sustaining chemical system." You are not self-sustaining. You depend on a large variety of inputs from the biosphere and beyond for your continued survival, such as food, water, oxygen and sunlight. And you are not merely a "chemical system." You are a living organism that requires very many biochemical systems and biological structures, and you are also a mind that cannot be explained by chemistry or brain activity. NASA's definition is dehumanizing, something that tries to make it sound as if you are just some chemistry.
What would a sensible definition of life look like? It might go something like this: "Any of many types of natural information-rich organisms that range in complexity from single cells to enormously organized and hierarchically structured multicellular organisms with minds, with typical characteristics such as the ability to reproduce (either individually or sexually in pairs) and a dependency on very many types of very complex and highly organized molecules such as proteins and nucleic acids, most involving a very special arrangement of hundreds or thousands of chemical components." That would be a sensible definition of life that would apply to everything from an amoeba to a human. Such a definition would also be appropriate for some type of extraterrestrial life, as it only mentions proteins and nucleic acids as examples of complex molecules, without ruling out other forms of life that might be based on different types of complex molecules.
Another example of a bad NASA definition is its definition of UAP. There was a perfectly good term in use to refer to mysterious things flying around in the sky: the term UFO, which stood for Unidentified Flying Object. For some strange reason, NASA has tried to replace this term with the term UAP. On the NASA page here with a title of "UAP," we read this: "On June 9, 2022, NASA announced that the agency is commissioning a study team to examine unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) – that is, observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena – from a scientific perspective." What sense does it make to restrict the definition of "unidentified anomalous phenomena" to "events in the sky" when the majority of unidentified anomalous phenomena are not observed in the sky, but on the surface of the planet, such as in houses and buildings constructed by humans? No sense at all.
A sensible definition of UAP would be "any phenomenon apparently produced by causes that are not understood." Things such as apparition sightings and near-death experiences are examples of unidentified anomalous phenomena, as are mysterious unidentified things seen in the sky.
These were UAP, though not seen in the sky
Another definition that NASA has flubbed is the definition of the word planet. The Cambridge Dictionary has a good definition of planet: "an extremely large, round mass of rock and metal, such as Earth, or of gas, such as Jupiter, that moves in a circular path around the sun or another star." Under that sensible definition, our solar system has nine planets, including Pluto.
Senselessly in the 1980's astronomers tried to introduce some strange new definition of the word planet. On this NASA page we read some strange definition of "planet": "A planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit." What's wrong with that? Well, for one thing according to such a definition, all of the planets being discovered around other solar systems are not planets, because they are not "in orbit around the Sun." Another thing wrong with the definition is that it introduces some restrictive arbitrary definition that sounds as arbitrary as someone saying, "A Christian is someone who believes in the infallible authority of scripture, and one who has had a 'born-again' experience." After this silly new definition of "planet," a new "woke rule" was introduced under which it was senselessly forbidden to call Pluto (a body with a diameter of 2376 kilometers) a planet. Nothing new was discovered about Pluto that justified such a change.
A NASA page on Pluto has this silly-sounding statement:
"Pluto is a dwarf planet located in a distant region of our solar system beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt. Pluto was long considered our ninth planet, but the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet in 2006."
How silly a principle, that there was a conference in 2006, and that we must all now speak in accordance with the speech rule proclaimed by that conference, rather than according to the definitions in dictionaries such as the Cambridge Dictionary. And how silly for NASA to be telling us on one hand that Pluto is not the ninth planet, and telling us on the other hand that Pluto is a dwarf planet. That's as silly as saying, "There are not nine humans in line, because the ninth one in line is not a human but a small human."
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