Can stars and AlphaGo called “life form”? I love astronomy and sometimes go out for stargazing. When I look at those stars, I am always wondering “are they living?” Well, stars do “die”. Then the new stars will be “born” from the ashes. If the new stars resemble to the old ones and they can evolve, then why can’t we literally call them a “life form”? But the problem is that it’s quite hard for us to really know about it, as that process would usually take millions even billions of years, which possibly if not probably outlives us all, the humanity. Imagine the bacteria living inside us, they are civilized, they developed science, philosophy, arts, even quantum physics (could be a little easier for them because of their sizes). But the bacteria scientists may never be aware that the whole space they live in is actually a living thing. I gather we might be like those bacteria more or less. AlphaGo makes me to rethink about what life is. Can we call it a “life form”? It can be duplicated, it can evolve. Most of people will laugh at that idea because it doesn’t have a “body”. But we always can make a robot body, maybe a male looking one, put AlphaGo into that body. If that happens, it could be a bit ambiguous either we agree or disagree that AlphaGo has life. However, we surely can copy AlphaGo out and destroy that body, put it into another body, let’s say a hottie. So the body looks quite like some kind of “cloth” in this case. My question is, can we simplify the definition of “life” to merely three words--spontaneously evolving information? Perspective is a very powerful thing. Perspective can change. If we change our perspectives, something amazing may happen. For example, if life can be considered “spontaneously evolving information”, languages can be deemed to be a “life form”. Then we can “borrow” some study methods from biology and apply them to linguistics. Linguists may draw some scientific predictions which are falsifiable. Such as, if the globalization and internet continue to develop, the diversity of languages would dramatically decrease (like you put all species into the same continent). We would witness the largest “linguicide” in the human history in the following decades. We may even calculate the estimated rates of language extinctions and take measures in advance in order to preserve the invaluable heritages given by our ancestors over hundreds of thousands generations.