All life on Earth can be described as fractal bloat and divide functions. This is the most compact definition of life that appears to exist. From that statement it is possible to work out how life originated on Earth and speculate on fundamentally different types of life forms that do not as yet exist on Earth. It is simply a function that expands like a balloon and divides into two like a bacteria.
All cells reproduce by expanding and dividing into two.
But what has been missed all this time is that from a fractal perspective, all creatures great and small obey that same rule of expanding and dividing by two. Even when discussing offspring, this holds true as they are still composed of matter and the clump of matter is expanding and dividing into two. Life is similar at all geometric scales, but looking at the atomic level, it is finally possible to see how life itself could have formed from simple fractal bloat and divide matter functions. A common source of bubbles is deep underwater volcanoes emitting superheated fluids mixed with a rich soup of chemicals. When a bubble is formed under such circumstances, the internal chemistry of the bubble is different from its outside.