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I think that the way we defined life in class is as good as it's going to get. There is no way without ripping apart a being/non-being to tell if it is "alive" or not in one characteristic. Improbable construction is definitely not something that I would have thought of on my own, but it useful to define things that are living. I know that if you ground a rock to dust, it would not be a rock anymore, but it still could become a rock again given many years and some pressure. An animal would decompose into the earth with no chance of changing back into animal. I think that it would be a better system if we could find a way to narrow it down to one characteristic, but that would be fairly impossible, so this classifacation is as good as we can humanly get at the moment.