I totally eat stuff up like that.

I listened to the audio book of "The Andromeda Strain" a few months ago and one thing that was intriguing was these doctors and scientists were trying to prove that something was alive. One of them said that a black piece of fabric was living because it converted energy. One of the more eccentric ones said that a rock was alive but we couldn't comprend it because our understanding of time was so short. To the rock we were unequaly as thought to be alive because we only existed in a fraction of a second in it's timespan. Some good stuff in that book..