and does this mean we can recreate this process to manipulate life into whatever we want?
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Some molecules tend to create more copies of themselves. This is just chemistry. The molecules are not alive, but if they exist then their structure tends to cause other atoms to arrange themselves in a similar way.
These new molecules are not exact copies. There is variant A, variant B, variant C, etc. Some copies tend to cause the creation of even more copies of themselves. Maybe variant F had a shell of atoms that made the molecule survive longer before falling apart, which gave it more time to make copies.
Some time later variant FFAJJ is able to use energy from the sun to make even more copies.
At some point,the molecule does a sufficient number of things that we declare it to be alive.
At which point is it alive? What does it even mean to be alive? This is a hard question to answer, you can define life but there will always be edge cases. Is a virus alive? How about a prion?
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