Just to get this part of the forum started, I want you to ask yourself: what is life?
In technicality sense, there are 7 characteristics of life:
1. responsiveness to the environment
2. growth
3. the ability to reproduce
4. have a metabolism
5. maintaining homeostasis
6. being made of cells
7. the ability to pass traits to offspring
However, the recent debate that dates back to decades ago (1898) is whether or not viruses qualify as living. The reason? Well, viruses need a host to reproduce and have a metabolism. In addition, it does not need energy (e.g. ATP) in order to survive. By the way, viruses -- to put it simply -- are parasites. They are what cause malicious diseases such as Hepatitis A and B, influenza, and measles.
So, I want to know, with this small snippet of knowledge, what do you think? Are viruses alive or not?