THIS IS A QUESTION THAT WE ALL ASK OURSELVES BUT THAT IS NOT COMPLETELY CLEAR OR WELL ANSWERED, ONLY CLARIFIED AND SOMEWHAT DEFINED AS IT IS NOW.
What is life?
Life is often defined as something capable of being born, being maintained, responding to external stimuli, reproducing and dying. With this definition, the human race could be considered as a living being, but for life to continue to exist we all know that it is very necessary for new entities to be produced, so that in the end the only thing that prevails over time is genetic information, normally DNA.
So from this point of view we could say that life is nothing but information struggling to persist, this is much less romantic information but it doesn't lack meaning and viruses are good proof of that.
Viruses are nothing more than things that are capable of reproducing themselves infinitely but lack cellular structure and cells are considered basic units of life.
But what are the cells?
After all, they are nothing more than areas of space with a thin membrane that isolates them from the disorderly outer world of their orderly inner world, inside them there are only many things but none of them considered as living.