Cosmic Life Hypothesis: Environment-Relative Criteria for Life and Nested Organisation Across Stellar and Galactic Scales

This article presents the Cosmic Life Hypothesis, an environment-relative and scale-dependent proposal about what humans classify as living or nonliving. The author's starting question is whether survival requirements learned from life on Earth—such as breathable atmosphere for humans, water-based metabolism, cellular biology, or particular modes of reproduction—should be treated as compulsory for every conceivable form of existence throughout space. Using a unicellular bacterium as an analogy for individual completeness at a small scale, the author asks whether the Sun might be an individual cosmic living unit whose sustaining conditions involve gravity, fusion, temperature, pressure, plasma and motion rather than terrestrial biology. In turn, the Milky Way is considered as a possible larger organised individual containing numerous distinct contributors, among them stars, planets, diffuse matter, dark matter and black holes. The hypothesis further examines motion, differences among galaxies, local loss versus system-wide disruption, renewal, and nested levels extending to the cosmic web. The discussion also records the author's Islamic reflection on creation's glorification of Allah, separately from empirical claims. The comparisons do not show that stars or galaxies are alive: neither a distinctive biological mechanism nor a discriminating test has yet been established. A research agenda is outlined to investigate whether the proposal can be defined operationally and evaluated against existing astrophysical models.