What is the 'rule' for living things??

Mrs. Smith is the coolest teacher ever. Let me tell you why:

1. She is beautiful

2. She is the funniest person on Earth

3. She has a cute cat

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Here's what I think about the 'rule' for living things. There are the standardized rules like reproduction... excretion... etc. But in my opinion, even if it is probably wrong, to be alive would be to have an existence on this earth. And if you're going to contradict what I say by saying cars are alive, then you should probably understand first of all what I mean by existing on Earth. 

Organisms like plants and even one-celled organisms like bacteria, they follow the 'rules' of being alive. They have a circle of life. They can die, and they can grow and multiply. Here's how I decide if something is non-living or living. Besides the breathing part for humans... animals... e.g., is it possible for this something to die? No, this does not mean by making a transition from living category to non-living category. It has to be alive in the first place. 

To be alive means that it has once been alive or is still alive. On the contrary, non-living means that it has never been living in the first place. For example, a laptop is not alive. You can say that it was manufactured and that it was built from pieces... and therefore given 'life', but that's practically a metaphor! Because you can't say that a laptop is alive, just like a car is not alive. 

To categorize something into non-living, it's not able to reproduce, to multipy, to make excretion...e.g. Let's take the car as an example again... You can say fumes are a car's excretion, and you can say building a counterpart of the car counts as multiplying or reproducing, but remember what a car is made out of? Actually, I am not all that clear, but metal is some part of it. And metal was not alive and is not alive. If the metal the car was built out of was not alive, then the car is not living either. Some non-living things, like the car have living characteristics, that is true, but it is still considered non-living. It can be confusing since a car (the example I keep using) does appear to look like it is 'alive' when it is up and speeding off on roads.

I would love to think that a car is alive, that it's going to transform into a giant robot and save my life or something. Or maybe that my laptop is alive and can do my homework for me. But they aren't because they can't do what a living thing can. I can't tell my laptop to reproduce or do such a thing like grow from a white Macbook to one with a refrigerator built inside.