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Life has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones Date Process Result October 17, 2007 Peer review Not reviewed June 13, 2012 Peer review Reviewed December 30, 2015 Good article nominee Not listed April 4, 2016 Good article nominee Not listed May 6, 2016 Peer review Reviewed August 7, 2022 Peer review Reviewed September 27, 2023 Good article nominee Listed A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on November 5, 2023. The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that life exists in every part of the biosphere, from the deepest parts of the ocean (bacterium pictured) to altitudes of up to 40 miles (64 km) in the atmosphere? Current status: Good article

This  level-1 vital article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to multiple WikiProjects.

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There is a request, submitted by [[User:Sdkb|Sdkb]] ([[User talk:Sdkb|talk]]), for an audio version of this article to be created. For further information, see WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia. The rationale behind the request is: Level-1 vital article.

"LUCA" is placed at ~4.150 BYA, which is not only older than the earliest possible time frame for any sort of life or even proto life, but also before the timeline's own stated time frame for the emergence of single-cellular life. Wrongperson58 (talk) 02:44, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This concerns the template, not this article. I've left a note on the template's talk page. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:22, 31 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

Change "All life over time eventually reaches a state of death, and none is immortal." to "only some organisms, like the Turritopsis dohrnii have biological immortality, though most other life will eventually decease." Ducksarecute22 (talk) 16:00, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

 Not done for now: please establish a consensus for this alteration before using the {{Edit semi-protected}} template.

Certainly an interesting thing to discuss, but this would need reliale sources and verification in body. Slomo666 (talk) 17:52, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Could some edit be done to clarify that the English word "life" is not a slang word or informal term but rather the neutral word for life in the English language and that biota is a word learned in education from with roots in Greek? Graythx (talk) 01:41, 31 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure it's our job to do the first part (Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and life is a common word). On "biota", we should say it's not exactly a synonym (it means the life of a particular place): its etymology is possibly worth mentioning, but not the key issue. Chiswick Chap (talk) 10:30, 31 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Am I the only one annoyed by the insistence on continually bringing up possible alien life in this article? At this point, life beyond Earth is pure fantasy and has no place in this article. This should absolutely be removed from the introduction: "...and the possibility of extraterrestrial life, which is likely to be very different from terrestrial life." It's wishful thinking from a Star Trek addict--in fact, most credible scientists working on this suggest that any alien life is likely to be chemically similar and is unlikely to be multi-cellular. Random staircase (talk) 17:39, 29 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your view, but scientists don't think so. The probability of life's having arisen elsewhere, given the huge number of planets, is very high. "Chemically similar" conceals a multitude of possibilities, not least that the genetic code is quite arbitrary, and other encodings are highly likely, even if there are things roughly like ribosomes and roughly like transfer RNAs: and of course the cellular machinery could well be radically different. But WP:NOTFORUM: it isn't for us to reason about all this, but simply to report what has been written in reliable sources, which is what the article does. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:06, 29 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, fine. I still think it's inappropriate to take such a noticeable and repetitive place in the article given that--you know--it's still just wishful thinking, even if it's likely there are bacteria out there somewhere.

Maybe just mention the likely possibility of other life ONCE further down and take it out elsewhere? There's no justification for it to be such a prominent feature. Random staircase (talk) 23:01, 29 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]