Lee Cronin argues that the definition of life is muddled among biologists, stating, "You ask 10 different biologists what life is, you get 1000 different answers." His definition encompasses any system producing complexity at scale, emphasizing that complexity should be the focus of determining life.
Cronin believes Assembly Theory could redefine our understanding of life, as it introduces parameters for life evaluation: time to create, decay, and persist, helping quantify the life status of systems.
In developing an 'origin of life machine,' Cronin and his team aim to reproduce conditions conducive to life emergence, which could fundamentally alter our views on life's origin and future.
He explains, "The way to determine if a system is alive or not is to calculate its Assembly...count the number of objects that are identical, and...get the Assembly Index."
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