"There can't be so much as a microbe or the show's off." Famous (nearly) last words of Carol Marcus, admonishing the crew of Reliant about selecting a suitable target for the Genesis torpedo. Had Chekov not noted a minor energy flux reading on one dyno scanner, Khan's transhuman colony would have been obliterated "in favor of its new matrix." (Making "something we can transplant" very ironic given the events of "Space Seed.")

One wonders why it's so hard to find a lifeless body in space. You'd think they'd be all over the place. (Certainly life has never been hard to find in any Trek!) Yet life resists an easy or simple definition. Attempts to do so often revolve around self-replication, evolution, and less often the use of carbon or water. The debate still rages, obviously even to Dr. Marcus' time, regarding the vital status of microbes. (They obviously replicate, sometimes using the genetic tools of a host, but virii also self-assemble.) And machines? They can self-replicate, they can evolve - are they alive? Maybe today's are not, but tomorrow we may not be as sure.

For the most part TOS ignored artificial life (though artificial intelligence pops up right and left). "My son, the doctor" is not life, Korby and Mudd's androids are likely not life, rather down-to-pulse mechanical simulations. Contrast these with Blade Runner's replicants that require sophisticated interrogation to successfully distinguish from human. (Obviously a stomach panel or subcutaneous resistors won't do!) Flint's creations may qualify and another column will address that issue soon.

TNG did much better displaying a candidate spectrum from droidy exocomps (in the aptly named "The Quality of Life") to the starhorse Gomtuu ("Tin Man"). Despite Picard's thunderous declaration in "The Measure of a Man," Data is not alive. (Starfleet was also founded to seek out new civilizations - and like a race of androids wouldn't count - so "well there it sits!" Right victory for the wrong reason.)

So far in its general avoidance of things technological "Enterprise" hasn't really broached the question. Yet interesting advances in artificial life - like design your own virus homekits - begin to make headlines. So what's in a name? By any other name life would remain as precious. At some point the pragmatic details of concern for another tier of life must encounter the urge of terrestrial life's "manifest destiny." There can't be so much as a microbe of doubt, before we go disposing (to use Guinan's alert) any possible creatures from our ongoing investigation into its origins - or its destiny.