Do you realize that living things is already disobeying what called "Murphy's Law" that stating "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong" because the thermodynamics equilibrium condition of living things with its surrounding is becoming dead. By referring Murphy's Law we can assume that everything will fall into the worst possible outcomes (which likely has higher entropy than the other outcomes).
Let we recall the previous post and the first one. Back then, we already define life in term of entropy (disorderliness) and what atoms forming our body, also what materials formed it.
The orderliness of living things is spanning from cells and its component up to the organisms level itself. The order could be seen in many ways, one of the examples is you can see the beautiful structure of living organisms' cells. The cells have certain shapes and composition which correlated to its particular function in the body supporting its own life.
As explained before, living things is having low entropy and it was lower than its surrounding. The condition needed to maintain that low entropy is there must exists such energy source that then the energy can be collected by that living things. We know that all of the organisms (on Earth) is carbon-based life, they carry their genetics information on their DNA, and dependent to water. But there was a chance that extraterrestrial life is not based on carbon at all, there some hypothesis that said life may be based on silicon or maybe the some other substances that we may yet to aware of, that actually based on what are the elements exist on there (surrounding).
What we need to aware of is we know that living things have low entropy and need the energy source to make it happens. Some organisms in Earth (as we know about it) get their energy from the source for doing metabolism by various way. Some organisms getting its energy source from waste product of the other organisms (animals using oxygen to respire which actually the plants waste product, eating the other organisms, food chain). But we know that the most prominent energy source is the one which seems to provide much of energy, the stars. The stars provide its energy to the surrounding by the mean of electromagnetic radiation. The stars could be used as preliminary indicator that the planets or something (satellites, meteorites, etc) not so far from it may support life.
To detect earth-like life out there we could use DNA detection method because all we know about earth life is carbon based and they stored their genetics information on the DNA or the easier way by detecting the microscopic scale features using microscope. The problem of DNA detection method is most of it using chemical based detection which impractical if we send some kind of remote instrument (e.g. rover) with limited amount of resources to do the chemical reaction for many times. But, there was some alternative method which not employing some chemical reaction but using electrohydrodynamic (electromagnetic and fluid) phenomenon. The proposed method is having lab-on-a-chip format which need only small amount of sample. But there some another drawback if we use this method with limited amount of resources as mentioned before, contamination. The contamination problems is related with reusability of lab-on-a-chip device which need to be sterilized before performing another analysis to the other samples or we dump the used device. This is not a huge problems if we only looked into neighboring planets of the Earth which we can send another instruments (let forget about the costs this time). But if we want to look to the further planets then we must take into the account seriously about this contamination problems which may raise some false alarms. Furthermore this method is only could be useful if the life we look is earth-like life which has DNA.
Feature detection in microscopic scale may raise similar contamination problem, but it is much lower than the direct contact observation that performed in lab-on-a-chip device between the sample and the chip used. This feature detection which based on visual observation is kind of like the proposed method in the sauce about fractal complexity analysis but this observe in microscopic scale. The object we observe whether they are living things or not will give difference in shape. The low entropy of living things will make it has high level of complexity and ordered shape of cells. The orderliness of living things is also could be observed at organism level as said few paragraphs before.
But there some other things than living things which actually have high level of order and low entropy, the crystals. What the other things we need to do is to avoid the false alarms detection of this kind of things. Crystallization have some kind of similarities with living things in the matter of self-entropy and entropy production to the surrounding. The most major difference between them is the crystals is having soft entropy difference (spatial gradient) with it surroundings because it was natural process that happen if certain condition is met thus not extremely localized. The living things is unlikely having such relationship with it surrounding, the entropy difference is likely to be large. In example hot blooded animals like human beings maintain their body temperature at 37 centigrade which higher than surrounding temperature (e.g. 25 centigrade for assumption) thus their body constantly releasing heat as waste (producing entropy to the surrounding). They also keeps releasing heat in because of their activity.
The other method we could use is to observe the mass and energy exchange between the system and its surrounding. To observe the mass and energy exchange we need to compare it what the natural things that likely to happens (based on Murphy's Law), if there some unexpected things happened we need to raise suspicion to that events. We could measure the mass flow and temperature by some kind of instruments to do that observation. Same as before, we need to minimize the false alarms by not doing direct contact measurement. To measure the flows we could use Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and the temperature could be measured by the means of infrared radiation emitted from the objects observed using thermal camera for example.
If there some particle (mass) flow or temperature changes that seems to be not natural, changes occurs in higher rate than the natural one, there must be certain unnatural/unusual factors that may take roles (which unlikely happens in crystallization or another natural processes). The general idea about this unnatural changes is the metabolism of living things as we know it (on Earth) is having some kind of fluctuations because it reacts with surrounding condition that affecting their life which is unlikely to be dynamically changing. Like some animals is active during the day, the others during the night, the plants is doing photosynthesis only when the sun is providing it lights (during the day), etc.
The fluctuations is the effect of the living things actively reducing its entropy which by the time goes the entropy is increased and needed to be lowered to maintain their life. The living things keeping their internal condition not to change extremely to some kind of stable condition.
Life itself is a mystery, we haven't met the other one yet. Where is everybody?
Pungkasan.
I'm not giving any kind of conclusion this time. Hhhh.
Sauce: