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expressions. 2 While many scientists apply only a few criteria for describing a living system, I propose a demanding array of six criteria—a composite taken from a range of sources—for considering whether the universe is alive:
    Is the universe unified despite its great size?
    Is energy flowing throughout?
    Is it being continuously regenerated?
    Is there sentience or consciousness throughout?
    Is there freedom of choice?
    Is our universe able to reproduce itself?
    This is a very challenging list of criteria for our universe to meet if we are to regard it as a living system. Let’s consider them one at a time, drawing insights from respected sources in mainstream science and cosmology. These discussions are not fringe science; rather, they draw from well-established sources within the scientific community.

A Unified Universe
    A living entity is a unified whole, not a random collection of disconnected parts. How could our universe, which appears to be mostly empty space with widely separated islands of matter, be unified? On the surface, our universe appears to be composed of separate components, from atoms to people to planets. How is it possible to regard these pieces as parts of a unified whole? Reflect for a momenton the scale of unity we are considering. Our home galaxy—the Milky Way—is a swirling, disk-shaped cloud containing a hundred billion stars. It is part of a local group of nineteen galaxies (each with a hundred billion stars of its own) that form part of a super-cluster of thousands of galaxies. Beyond this, astronomers estimate that there are perhaps a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe (each, again, with a hundred billion stars). How could this vastness be regarded as an undivided whole?
    One of the most stunning insights to emerge from modern science has been described as
non-locality
. The basic idea is simple: In the past, scientists have assumed that instant communication cannot take place between two distant points; instead, it takes time for a message to travel from one place to another, even at the speed of light. For example, it takes light about eight minutes to travel from the Sun to the Earth, which means that something could happen on the Sun and it would take eight minutes before we would know about it on Earth. Because other galaxies are millions of light-years away from us, they seem so remote as to be completely separate from our own existence. Yet scientific experiments show that, despite these vast distances that seem impossible to bridge, in reality everything in the universe is deeply interconnected. 3 Experiments have repeatedly demonstrated that subatomic particles are able to communicate
instantly
with one another, regardless of the distances that separate them.
    The highly regarded physicist David Bohm explained this phenomenon by portraying the universe as a gigantic hologram that is regenerated at each moment. In Bohm’s view, the entire cosmos is a dynamic projection from a deeper common ground that is holographic in nature. At every moment, every part of the universe contains information about the whole. Analogously, if you take a holographic picture of a person and then cut the plate in half, wheneach half is illuminated, it will contain the entire original image, although more faintly. If each of the halves is cut in half again, each of the pieces will contain a smaller but complete version of the original. The whole is in every part and every part is in the whole.
    Nonlocality exists, not because of extremely fast messaging back and forth at the subatomic level, but because separation does not exist. Bohm said that ultimately we have to see the entire universe as “a single, undivided whole.” 4 Instead of separating the universe into living things and non-living things, he viewed animate and inanimate matter as inseparably interwoven with the life force that is present throughout the universe. For Bohm, even a rock has its