system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What's the deal with viruses? Are they alive or not?

In high school they tell you viruses are not living things, but I know college professors that will tell you they technically are. Is there an official consensus?
gpt
Depends on how you define alive.  Contains DNA? (Ding! that's easy.).  Contains proteins in a membrane? (Ding!). 

Viruses replicate (but then again, so do prions).  They sometimes contain some of the parts to replicate themselves (see the Pol protein in retroviridae as an example) so they do have some of the machinery to reproduce.  

One big difference is, viruses can't replicate without other machinery (most notably the ribosome and often some DNA or RNA synthesis machinery).  But, that isn't exactly a unique property of viruses.  Plenty of other organisms rely on outside "machinery" to help propagate and almost everything has some sort of outside dependency (humans for example need a whole series of gut flora and essential nutrients to survive).  

So the big determining factor should be whether a virus generates its own energy in order to replicate.  Single-cell organisms (and all higher-order ones) generate energy by breaking down some nutrient molecule and uses that towards cellular processes.  A virus does not.  If this is how you define "alive" then viruses are not alive.

The really interesting question is: are self-replicating RNA sequences alive by this definition?