 Hey there. I want to welcome you to our very first lecture in a general biology course. These lectures, these video lectures are designed for a non-majors biology course that goes with a laboratory experience. And it is for non-majors. So folks who are planning on becoming biologists likely will be taking a different class. This course provides a broad conversation about living critters. And it makes sense that in our very first lecture we will do the grand and ambitious task of attempting to define life. Biology is the study of life. So anything that's alive and this is part of why I feel super lucky to have the job that I have because any living thing we can study it in this class. And if you look at the images I have on the screen here, you will see that and if you look around you likely, you will see that holy cow there is a lot of diversity in living critters. And this whole course we get to spend looking at that diversity. In addition to looking at the diversity, which I don't know about you, but I look at all these critters and I'm like dude, yes, these are so cool. And they're all really different. But ultimately, they all are really similar and that's a lot of this course. A lot of this course we're going to be looking at. However, all those things, what do they have in common and what are the processes that they all engage in and what are they made out of and how do they work and we will see that there's a lot of similarity in this area. In this lecture, we are going to attempt to define life and we're going to look at some characteristics of life and then we're going to spend a little bit of time just for fun looking at some of the diversity in living systems. Okay, I don't know about you. I'm excited about this. Let's go!