Living organisms build and repair themselves with commonly available starting materials

That living organisms can build themselves and invent replacements for their missing parts out of the common materials found freely composable in the world.

This is also in line with the “when it breaks, what parts does it break into” parable of fragility in software.

References:

Bray, Wetware (2009), p. 207

So what might this missing juice be? The most conspicuous difference, implied by the word juice, is that living creatures are made of soft, wet, carbon-based materials as opposed to the hard, dry silicon and metal of computers and robots. Living creatures make use of a different, and unique, form of chemistry that enables them to regenerate by reproducing their bodies using commonly available starting materials.

That certainly is part of it a heart pacemaker or a prosthetic limb may serve a particular human function as well as, or even in some respects better than, its human equivalent. But these inanimate structures do not grow and repair themselves. They do not adapt to changing circumstances in the same way as the natural structures. Any attempt to match organisms in this regard would call for machines able to mine ores, extract metals and silicon, refine, mill, draw parts, have the equivalent of a factory assembly line plus a hi-tech facility for the production and assembly of microchips, all driven by solar power or other readily accessible form of power-patently futile.

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