Is fire alive?

Interesting…

Burning is an oxidation process that produces a flame and other products. We romanticize it in a big way, and it is a marvelous metaphor for a lot of things, but it is no more alive than steam is.

Oh god. Not this again. Didn’t you settle this shit like two years ago?

If it is, then when is the moment of conception?

Shut up Sean.

I don’t think so. It’s just an element and those terms are metaphors. (Is water alive? It dances. What about wind? It howls and roars.)

@lataylor “whether it be ligthning from a storm,a lighter, or any other way of starting a fire.”

Have you ever “murdered” a fire?

But fire has many of the characteristics of life. It eats (oxygen), it defecates (ash), it reproduces (when more oxygen is available, it grows).

@lataylor “who hasnt put out a fire before?”

Can you teach a fire anything?

@lataylor “can you teach grass something?”

Can you teach a bacterium anything?

Is anything “alive”? It’s conceivable that you’re just a complex chemical process, aren’t you? Fire could be just as alive, and just as dead, as you, depending on what you think of life.

Can fire replicate spontaneously, without extrinsic assistance?

Uber.. why are you quoting?

Humans cannot replicate without outside resources. The same goes for ants, birds, lizards and fish. Oxygen is needed, as well as nutrients from food. Water is also needed.

Fire, like humans, require elements from the periodic table to survive.

You couldn’t disqualify fire based on the meaning of the word “alive”... but you certainly could on the word “life”. You make the call.

Fire is an action. It is not an object on it’s own. Rather, fire is the process of rapid oxidation of a previously existing object.

In western medicine and science, people support their theories using physical means, such as elements, compounds and biological means. However, not many people realize that science and medicine can have multiple explanations. One being the physical, and the second being the energetic. The energetic ways of dealing with science rely less on chemicals and more on the heat and radiation being emitted from certain things. some good examples of this are acupuncture, yoga and certain types of massage. Many ailments are cured by blocking, sealing or opening pathways that could allow certain types of energy in or out. The use of heat is also used a lot in these practices.

Very little is known about this, because of the influence that western medicine has on the world. I will look more into this tomorrow, but know I’m going to bed.

I vote no.

@Allie I think he’s quoting his friend’s comebacks to the arguments.

@augustlan Ah, got it, thanks.

Your friend has an interesting argument. Relying on currently accepted definitions of “life”, I would say that his argument is only valid metaphorically. If we concede that we are fallible and could be misguided in our current definitions, then it is entirely possible that fire is “alive” in some sense. After all, people “knew” that illness was caused by demons or imbalanced humors before we discovered bacteria. How can we know which “facts” in our current stockpile of knowledge will be shown false at some point in the future? Regardless of what I personally believe to be true and real, I think it’s foolish to insist unequivocally that we can’t be proven wrong. None of us are omniscient, so far as I know. Then again, my motto has always been that nothing is impossible; some things are simply much more probable than others.

I think Robert De Niro (Donald ‘Shadow’ Rimgale) described it best in the movie “Backdraft”:

“It’s a living thing, Brian. It breathes, it eats, and it hates. The only way to beat it is to think like it. To know that this flame will spread this way across the door and up across the ceiling, not because of the physics of flammable liquids, but because it wants to. Some guys on this job, the fire owns them, makes ‘em fight it on it’s level, but the only way to truly kill it is to love it a little.”

@augustlan yup, thats what he was saying :). Btw he thinks fluther is the coolest site ever heh

Well at least he’s right about something!

Fire is not alive. It is a chemical reaction regarded with a reaction to heat and oxygen. its like saying water is alive when you open a bottle of pure hydrogen. You have two chemicals that bond the instant the seal is broken on the bottle. It doesn’t grow, the energy is merely transformed or transferred to a new state.

Fire is plasma.

No it isn’t.

Are there any living things that do not contain cells?

All living things have certain characteristics

Let’s see if Fire has them all :

1. Living things are made of cells.- FALSE. end of discussion, but I will go on anyway.
2. Living things obtain and use energy – Can be argued either way, so we will give this a True.
3. Living things grow and develop. – True
4. Living things reproduce. – Hmm. It is true that fire can lead to more fire, but fire can be initiated from non living things, such as two flint stones being rubbed against each other, or a match stick against a hard surface. Living things do not arise from non-living things. Spontaneous generation was disproven a while back. Therefore, FALSE.
5. Living things respond to their environment. – Debatable.
6. Living things adapt to their environment. – Debatable.

Like I mentioned earlier, lviing things have all of those 6 characteristics, since Fire fails on at least 2 of them, it can be agreed that it is in fact not alive.

Fire is not truly alive. For the flaming mode of combustion to occur four things must come together 1)reducing agent(fuel) 2)heat 3)oxidizing agent(usually oxygen) 4)chemical chain reaction. Fire is just a by product of combustion which is a chemical reaction. It can be extinguished by removal of any single componet. I have been a firefighter for twenty years. I can create fire. I can not create plants, animals, fungi, or bacterium without a “parent organism”.