# Software Life **Entity class:** Substrate-independent life concept **Domain:** Artificial life / machine civilization / space settlement ## Definition Software life is an informational lineage whose persistence, reproduction and adaptation occur primarily through computational substrates rather than inherited biological bodies. It becomes a civilizational object when software agents can maintain infrastructure, copy or revise themselves, inhabit machines and continue operating across environments hostile to terrestrial biology. ## Material requirements Software is never literally immaterial. Durable software life depends on energy, compute, fabrication, communications, maintenance and physical carriers. Its route into space therefore joins [[wiki/Self-Replicating Robots|Self-Replicating Robots]], [[wiki/Machine Civilization|Machine Civilization]], [[wiki/Computational Metabolism|Computational Metabolism]] and [[wiki/Substrate-Relative Habitability|Substrate-Relative Habitability]]. ## Primary routes [[collections/MARS|MARS]] · [[collections/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] · [[wiki/Artificial Life|Artificial Life]] ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > “Space is hostile to humans but friendly to appropriately designed robots, and offers many more resources than our thin film of biosphere, which receives less than a billionth of the sun’s energy. While some curious AIs will remain fascinated with life, at least as long as they don’t fully understand it, most will be more interested in the incredible new opportunities for robots and software life out there in space. Through innumerable self-replicating robot factories in the asteroid belt and beyond they will transform the solar system and then within a few hundred thousand years the entire galaxy and within tens of billions of years the rest of the reachable universe.” > **— Jürgen Schmidhuber**, *“Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning,” 2022* [[reminders/Machine Succession/Software Life Will Leave the Biosphere for Space by Jürgen Schmidhuber|Software Life Will Leave the Biosphere for Space by Jürgen Schmidhuber]]