- UID
- 782396
- 在线时间
- 小时
- 注册时间
- 2012-7-17
- 最后登录
- 1970-1-1
- 主题
- 帖子
- 性别
- 保密
|
期末考试周ing ~~~所以排版都比较的简单了 莫怪莫怪啊~~~我都快差点忘了今天是周六!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!靠!被考试弄神了一天都.....................
SPEED
[Time1]
Meet Anna Chen, Mo Yan's Swedish translator
As Chinese author Mo Yan arrived at the Swedish National Opera for a performance on Dec. 13, three days after he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, by his side was Anna Gustafsson Chen, his Swedish translator.
Chen, a native Swede born in 1965, has been in the business of translating Chinese works to Swedish for the last 20 years. As of 2012, she had translated 20 Chinese novels, including Mo Yan's "Red Sorghum", "The Garlic Ballads" and "Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out". She also has translated works from other famous Chinese novelists, including Yu Hua's "To Live" and Su Tong's "Wives and Concubines." Chen has been honored by the Swedish Academy Translation Award for her work.
Chen was first acquainted with Mo Yan's work "Red Sorghum" in the early 1960s. "I read Ge Haowen's English translation in a bookstore. Then, in Sweden it wasn't easy to find Chinese books. I found ["Red Sorghum"] interesting and later bought the Chinese version and tried to translate it," she said.
Although Mo Yan wrote the first draft of "Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out" in only 43 days, Chen spent six years translating it into Chinese. After initial success, she would go on to translate Zhang Wei's "The Ancient Ship" and Mo Yan's "Forty-one Cannons" and "Frogs".
Chen says her work has opened up a window to the world which few of her countrymen have explored.
"Learning Chinese has let me know that Sweden and the Western world are not the center of the world," she said. "In fact, where a person is, that's where the center of his world is."
(272)
[Time2]Working Christmas Day
It was unusually quiet in the emergency room on December 25.
I was triage nurse that day. I didn't think there would be any patients, sighing about having to work on Christmas. Just then five bodies showed up at my desk, a pale woman and four small children.
“Are you all sick?” I asked suspiciously.
“Yes,” she said weakly and lowered her head.
But when it came to descriptions of their presenting problems, things got a little vague. Two of the children had headaches, but the headaches weren't accompanied by the normal body language of holding the head or trying to keep it still. Two children had earaches, but only one could tell me which ear was affected. The mother complained of a cough but seemed to work to produce it.
Something was wrong, but I didn't say anything but explained that it might be a little while before a doctor saw her. She responded, “Take your time; it's warm in here.”
On a hunch, I checked the chart after the admitting clerk had finished registering the family. No address—they were homeless. The waiting room was warm.
I looked out at the family huddled by the Christmas tree. The littlest one was pointing at the television and exclaiming something to her mother. The oldest one was looking at an ornament on the Christmas tree.
I went back to the nurses' station and mentioned we had a homeless family in the waiting room. The nurses, grumbling about working Christmas, turned to compassion for a family just trying to get warm on Christmas. The team went into action, much as we do when there's a medical emergency. But this one was a Christmas emergency.
We were all offered a free meal in the hospital cafeteria on Christmas Day, so we claimed that meal and prepared a banquet for our Christmas guests. We needed presents. We put together oranges and apples in a basket. We collected from different departments candies, crayons and other things available that could be presents. As seriously as we met the physical needs of the patients that came to us that day, our team worked to meet the needs, and exceed the expectations, of a family who just wanted to be warm on Christmas Day.
Later, as the family walked to the door to leave, the four-year-old came running back, gave me a hug and whispered, “Thanks for being our angels today.”
[Time3]Are You There, People? It’s Me, God
Here’s my problem: I don’t believe in people. To me, human beings and their world are nothing more than the product of our collective imagination, a sad manifestation of our need to feel important beyond our actual existence. I also can’t help feeling that our lives would be better if no one believed in people; only then would we be able to truly deal with our problems without nursing the delusion of a universe that’s completely dependent on us.
The bottom line is that there are no easy answers to the questions we all have about life. Why are we here? Why are we all-seeing, all-knowing and immortal? How are we able to be everywhere at the same time? I don’t pretend to know. I do know, however, that these questions are not made easier by believing there’s a planet of people somewhere out there who depend on us to land their planes safely.
Like most of us, I was raised by parents who believed in the existence of people. Before every meal and every bedtime, we would sit quietly, “listening” to their prayers, and every Sunday morning I was awakened early so we could all go sit on our heavenly thrones for an hour, pretending to be worshipped. How ridiculous that all seems now! At the time, though, I never questioned any of it. In fact, for most of my teens, I spoke to a person named Moses who I believed was completely dependent on my advice. I now realize, of course, that this was nothing more than a delusion I needed in order to break free of my cloying parents and their needs.
As I grew, persistent questions nagged at me. I asked my father: If we have ultimate power over peoples’ lives, why can’t we just make them perfect and alleviate their suffering? That way, they wouldn’t need to pray anymore, and we wouldn’t need to listen! My father shook his head with a long-suffering look as if he’d caught me playing with his best lightning bolts. He explained to me that of course we couldn’t intervene in peoples’ lives like that, because then how would they grow and become purer souls? It’s hard to believe that I actually believed this. Absolutely crazy—the idea that we created people just to torture them!
After rejecting my parents’ faith, I dabbled in different forms of people-belief. For a while, I believed that people became happier when they killed animals for me. Then I believed that I buried a gold tablet for people to find. I even flirted with even flakier religions, believing that the peoples’ sun wouldn’t rise in the morning if I didn’t haul it up with my chariot (I was on anti-depressants at the time). Then, at perhaps my lowest point, I imagined that I had a son who I sent to the people to do with as they wished—some kind of bizarre loaner, I guess.
Then I had a breakthrough: Why did the people I believed in need me so badly? If I truly had dominion over every aspect of their lives, as I was led to believe, why were they so screwed up? I was familiar with the arguments of theologians—that somehow peoples’ sorry existence was further proof of their need for me. But I just couldn’t buy it anymore.
Since throwing off the shackles of believing in people, it hasn’t been easy living in a culture where everyone seems to think they’ve talked to some guy in a desert. When I recently tried to get medical help for my now-senile father—who actually believed that dead people with wings had come to live with him—I was told that my father was “comforted” by this delusion. When will we realize that there is nothing comforting about ignorance?
I’m frequently asked: Don’t you sometimes, late at night, at your lowest moments, wish that you were worshipped? When the chips are down, when you feel completely worthless, don’t you wish you could hear the prayers of billions of people asking you for help and comfort? And I would not be completely truthful if I didn’t say that sometimes, I do. After all, I’m only a god.
Illustration by Joost Swarte.
[Time4]
Egypt holds second stage of vote on draft constitution
Opponents of President Mohammed Morsi have held protests against the draft, saying it favours the Islamists now in power and betrays the revolution that overthrew Hosni Mubarak last year.
Mr Morsi's supporters say the constitution will secure democracy.
Some 250,000 security personnel have been deployed nationwide to try to keep order during the referendum.
Tension over the document has helped to fuel weeks of violence, including clashes in Alexandria on Friday.
Turnout was reported to be just above 30% in the first round, with unofficial counts suggesting some 56% of those who cast ballots voted in favour of the draft.
Polling stations opened at 08:00 local time (06:00 GMT) on Saturday and close at 19:00. However, if necessary voting can be extended, as it was in the first leg last weekend.
Official results are not expected until Monday, after appeals are heard. If the constitution passes, parliamentary elections must take place within three months.
'More unrest'
Ballots are being cast in the 17 provinces which did not vote in the first round on 15 December.
In the crowded working-class neighbourhood of Imbaba in Giza province, it's hard to know what's louder - the honking vehicles or the lively discussions on the referendum. Minibuses, cars and tuk tuks are all fighting their way through the winding queues of men and women that have formed outside polling stations here.
The one at El Nile school is designated for men only. Turn-out is high in this area, and there is a heavy security presence.
In a few seconds this part of the queue turns into a small cluster of people in heated arguments. As queues get longer and people wait patiently in the sun, more clusters like this one form and become louder.
The discussions are not just about the constitution, they're about President Morsi and the growing influence of the movement backing him - the Muslim Brotherhood. Even as they enter the polling stations, many Egyptians remain divided on the future of their country.
The areas are seen as more conservative and sympathetic to Mr Morsi's Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood.
Analysts suggest this will favour a "Yes" vote.
"I'm voting 'No' because Egypt can't be ruled by one faction," Karim Nahas, a 35-year-old stock market broker voting early on Saturday in Giza, told Reuters news agency.
Egyptians casting votes in favour of the charter said they were voting for stability.
(399)
(剩下的部分)
In the town of Fayoum, "yes" voter Hanaa Zaki told the Associated Press news agency: "I have a son who hasn't got paid for the past six months. We have been in this crisis for so long and we are fed up."
Opponents of the draft say it fails to protect the freedoms and human rights that they sought in the uprising that toppled Mr Mubarak. Some have also complained about the role given to Islamic clerics and what they say is a lack of a clear commitment to equality between men and women.
The campaign group Human Rights Watch has said the draft provides for basic protections against arbitrary detention and torture, but fails to end military trials of civilians or to protect freedom of expression and religion.
Ahead of the second round, opposition politicians said they thought further violence was likely.
"I see more unrest," said Ahmed Said, head of the liberal Free Egyptians Party and a member of the opposition coalition.
One voter in Ikhsas village, Marianna Abdel-Messieh, agreed. "Whether this constitution passes or not, there will be trouble," she told AP. "God have mercy on us."
Egypt's latest crisis began on 22 November, when Mr Morsi issued a decree granting himself broad powers.
The decree stripped the judiciary of any power to challenge his decisions.
After an outcry, the president revoked much of the decree, but he refused to back down on the draft constitution.
The text was rushed through by a constituent assembly dominated by Islamists and boycotted by liberal and left-wing members, as it faced a threat of dissolution by the country's top court.
[Time5]
Flocking to Finland to visit Santa Claus in Lapland
As all children know, there is only one Santa Claus. So many people travel all the way to Lapland in northern Finland to see Santa in his own home - but it is not just the youngsters who are excited.
As soon as I land at Rovaniemi airport, a giant screen informs me that I am at the official airport of Santa Claus.
At the baggage carousel, toy reindeer and bears form a winter's scene, while fluffy snowy owls stare down at the passing suitcases as if they were prey.
The rustling sound of waterproof jackets fill the air as families in the latest winter gear prepare to step outside into temperatures of -20C.
People from all over the world are here - the UK, Spain, China, Japan, Australia, and Mexico. Like me, they all want to see Santa Claus.
The official Santa Claus Village - a 10-minute bus ride away - is a collection of buildings made of stone and local pine wood, straddling the Arctic Circle.
A long queue of excited and expectant children - and adults - wait outside Santa's Grotto for the chance to meet him. Others have already seen him.
"Santa was like a ginormous giant," yells 5-year-old Lily. "He had big shoes and he ate porridge for breakfast."
Lily and her mum, Tania, are Australians living in London. Tania says she feels like a child again. "It is like living a dream through my daughter's eyes. It is something I would have wanted to do as a child."
Then 39-year-old Esmond from Hong Kong emerges from the grotto with his girlfriend, Tiffany, who is beaming.
She holds up her hand to reveal a ring on her wedding finger. "This has been my dream for a long time," she says. "But I did not realise Esmond was going to propose in front of Santa."
Esmond tells me that Santa Claus has always had a special meaning for him, which is why he got down on one knee in the grotto.
The proposal was captured on video by an elf so - for 50 euros (£40) - the happy couple have bought a memory stick of the moment, which they plan to show their future children.
In the early 1900s, Rovaniemi bustled with loggers and lumberjacks who stopped over in its bars and restaurants.
Towards the end of World War II, retreating German soldiers destroyed the city, burning every building in sight.
Famous Finnish architect, Alvar Aalto redesigned the city in the shape of reindeer antlers - although it is impossible to distinguish these at ground level.
The first sign marking the Arctic Circle was erected in the 1920s, but it was not until the former American First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited in 1950 that local tourist bosses realised the money spinning potential of the line.
(470)
(剩下的部分)
“Start Quote
A lot of people here ask for more time to spend with family and friends, so I would like us all to give and receive more time”
End Quote Santa Claus
Santa Claus is big business in Rovaniemi. The local gym is called Santa Sport, there is the Santa technology park and the local football team, FC Santa Claus, play in red and white. You can sleep at the Hostel Rudolf or Hotel Santa Claus.
Inside the Santa Claus Village post office, tourists write postcards home while "letter elves" organise beautifully decorated letters into piles of the countries they came from.
Some are addressed to Father Christmas in the North Pole, others to Mr Santa in Lapland. But they all find their way here.
One letter elf, Heidi, tells me Santa receives 30,000 letters a day at this time of year. By Christmas they expect to get more than half a million from around 200 countries. The main correspondents come from the UK, Italy and Poland.
"They are not only gift lists," says Heidi. "Sometimes they are thank you letters, or if some people have problems or sorrows, they want to share it with Santa."
On my way to the grotto, I meet Santa's little helper Elfiina, who claims to be 79. I remark that she looks like a normal 20-something woman from Finland.
"I am Elfiina," she says. "That is who I am. I am an Elf - Elfiina. But Santa is ready to see you now."
I am led through to the dimly lit "corridor of secrets" which is lined with presents. Bells chime and water runs underfoot. I go up a flight of stairs, turn the corner and there he is.
"Ho, ho, ho! Welcome to Lapland and the Arctic Circle," booms the portly bearded man who is sat on a large wooden chair, nestled between a map of the world and a bookcase.
"So, have you been a good boy this year?"
I tell him I have, and I ask for a warmer hat and thermal socks for Christmas. But what does he wish for?
"A lot of people here ask for more time to spend with family and friends," he says. "So I would like us all to give and receive more time."
I ask him if he minds me being in his grotto, instead of a child.
"Definitely not," he says. "Most of the visitors here are grown ups. I myself live in the world of dreams and fairytales and you are never too old to believe in them."
The queue for the grotto is long and my time is already up. But before I leave, I ask Santa Claus if he has a message for the BBC listeners. So this is from Santa: "With all my heart I wish each and every one of you a very happy and merry Christmas."
OBSTACLE
Martin Rees asks: Is this our final century?
作为一个天文学家，同时作为人类社会中忧心忡忡的一员，马丁?里斯爵士从宇宙全景的视角考察我们的星球和其未来。他敦促要采取行动以避免科技发展过程中可能出现的毁灭性后果。
If you take 10,000 people at random, 9,999 have something in common: their interests in business lie on or near the Earth's surface. The odd one out is an astronomer, and I am one of that strange breed. (Laughter) My talk will be in two parts. I'll talk first as an astronomer, and then as a worried member of the human race. But let's start off by remembering that Darwin showed how we're the outcome of four billion years of evolution. And what we try to do in astronomy and cosmology is to go back before Darwin's simple beginning, to set our Earth in a cosmic context.
And let me just run through a few slides. This was the impact that happened last week on a comet. If they'd sent a nuke, it would have been rather more spectacular than what actually happened last Monday. So that's another project for NASA. That's Mars from the European Mars Express, and at New Year. This artist's impression turned into reality when a parachute landed on Titan, Saturn's giant moon. It landed on the surface. This is pictures taken on the way down. That looks like a coastline. It is indeed, but the ocean is liquid methane -- the temperature minus 170 degrees centigrade. If we go beyond our solar system, we've learned that the stars aren't twinkly points of light. Each one is like a sun with a retinue of planets orbiting around it. And we can see places where stars are forming, like the Eagle Nebula. We see stars dying. In six billion years, the sun will look like that. And some stars die spectacularly in a supernova explosion, leaving remnants like that.
On a still bigger scale, we see entire galaxies of stars. We see entire ecosystems where gas is being recycled. And to the cosmologist, these galaxies are just the atoms, as it were, of the large-scale universe. This picture shows a patch of sky so small that it would take about 100 patches like it to cover the full moon in the sky. Through a small telescope, this would look quite blank, but you see here hundreds of little, faint smudges.
Each is a galaxy, fully like ours or Andromeda, which looks so small and faint because its light has taken 10 billion light-years to get to us. The stars in those galaxies probably don't have planets around them. There's scant chance of life there -- that's because there's been no time for the nuclear fusion in stars to make silicon and carbon and iron, the building blocks of planets and of life. We believe that all of this emerged from a Big Bang -- a hot, dense state. So how did that amorphous Big Bang turn into our complex cosmos?
I'm going to show you a movie simulation 16 powers of 10 faster than real time, which shows a patch of the universe where the expansions have subtracted out. But you see, as time goes on in gigayears at the bottom, you will see structures evolve as gravity feeds on small, dense irregularities, and structures develop. And we'll end up after 13 billion years with something looking rather like our own universe. And we compare simulated universes like that -- I'll show you a better simulation at the end of my talk -- with what we actually see in the sky. Well, we can trace things back to the earlier stages of the Big Bang, but we still don't know what banged and why it banged.
That's a challenge for 21st-century science. If my research group had a logo, it would be this picture here: an ouroboros, where you see the micro-world on the left -- the world of the quantum -- and on the right the large-scale universe of planets, stars and galaxies. We know our universes are united though -- links between left and right. The everyday world is determined by atoms, how they stick together to make molecules. Stars are fueled by how the nuclei in those atoms react together. And, as we've learned in the last few years, galaxies are held together by the gravitational pull of so-called dark matter: particles in huge swarms, far smaller even than atomic nuclei. But we'd like to know the synthesis symbolized at the very top. The micro-world of the quantum is understood. On the right hand side, gravity holds sway.
Einstein explained that. But the unfinished business for 21st-century science is to link together cosmos and micro-world with a unified theory -- symbolized, as it were, gastronomically at the top of that picture. And until we have that synthesis, we won't be able to understand the very beginning of our universe because when our universe was itself the size of an atom, quantum effects could shake everything.
And so we need a theory that unifies the very large and the very small, which we don't yet have. One idea, incidentally -- and I had this hazard sign to say I'm going to speculate from now on -- is that our Big Bang was not the only one. One idea is that our three-dimensional universe may be embedded in a high-dimensional space, just as you can imagine on these sheets of paper.
You can imagine ants on one of them thinking it's a two-dimensional universe, not being aware of another population of ants on the other. So there could be another universe just a millimeter away from ours, but we're not aware of it because that millimeter is measured in some fourth spatial dimension, and we're imprisoned in our three. And so we believe that there may be a lot more to physical reality than what we've normally called our universe -- the aftermath of our Big Bang. And here's another picture. Bottom right depicts our universe, which on the horizon is not beyond that, but even that is just one bubble, as it were, in some vaster reality. Many people suspect that just as we've gone from believing in one solar system to zillions of solar systems, one galaxy to many galaxies, we have to go to many Big Bangs from one Big Bang, perhaps these many Big Bangs displaying an immense variety of properties.
Well, let's go back to this picture. There's one challenge symbolized at the top, but there's another challenge to science symbolized at the bottom. You want to not only synthesize the very large and the very small, but we want to understand the very complex. And the most complex things are ourselves, midway between atoms and stars. We depend on stars to make the atoms we're made of. We depend on chemistry to determine our complex structure. We clearly have to be large, compared to atoms, to have layer upon layer of complex structure. We clearly have to be small, compared to stars and planets -- otherwise we'd be crushed by gravity. And in fact, we are midway. It would take as many human bodies to make up the sun as there are atoms in each of us. The geometric mean of the mass of a proton and the mass of the sun is 50 kilograms, within a factor of two of the mass of each person here. Well, most of you anyway. The science of complexity is probably the greatest challenge of all, greater than that of the very small on the left and the very large on the right. And it's this science, which is not only enlightening our understanding of the biological world, but also transforming our world faster than ever. And more than that, it's engendering new kinds of change.
And I now move on to the second part of my talk, and the book "Our Final Century" was mentioned. If I was not a self-effacing Brit, I would mention the book myself, and I would add that it's available in paperback.
And in America it was called "Our Final Hour" because Americans like instant gratification.
But my theme is that in this century, not only has science changed the world faster than ever, but in new and different ways. Targeted drugs, genetic modification, artificial intelligence, perhaps even implants into our brains, may change human beings themselves. And human beings, their physique and character, has not changed for thousands of years. It may change this century. It's new in our history. And the human impact on the global environment -- greenhouse warming, mass extinctions and so forth -- is unprecedented, too. And so, this makes this coming century a challenge. Bio- and cybertechnologies are environmentally benign in that they offer marvelous prospects, while, nonetheless, reducing pressure on energy and resources. But they will have a dark side. In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind on disaster. Indeed, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure -- error rather than terror. And even a tiny probability of catastrophe is unacceptable when the downside could be of global consequence.
(1047)
In fact, some years ago, Bill Joy wrote an article expressing tremendous concern about robots taking us over, etc. I don't go along with all that, but it's interesting that he had a simple solution. It was what he called "fine-grained relinquishment." He wanted to give up the dangerous kind of science and keep the good bits. Now, that's absurdly naive for two reasons. First, any scientific discovery has benign consequences as well as dangerous ones.
And also, when a scientist makes a discovery, he or she normally has no clue what the applications are going to be. And so what this means is that we have to accept the risks if we are going to enjoy the benefits of science. We have to accept that there will be hazards. And I think we have to go back to what happened in the post-War era, post-World War II, when the nuclear scientists who'd been involved in making the atomic bomb, in many cases were concerned that they should do all they could to alert the world to the dangers.
And they were inspired not by the young Einstein, who did the great work in relativity, but by the old Einstein, the icon of poster and t-shirt, who failed in his scientific efforts to unify the physical laws. He was premature. But he was a moral compass -- an inspiration to scientists who were concerned with arms control. And perhaps the greatest living person is someone I'm privileged to know, Joe Rothblatt. Equally untidy office there, as you can see. He's 96 years old, and he founded the Pugwash movement. He persuaded Einstein, as his last act, to sign the famous memorandum of
Bertrand Russell. And he sets an example of the concerned scientist. And I think to harness science optimally, to choose which doors to open and which to leave closed, we need latter-day counterparts of people like Joseph Rothblatt.
We need not just campaigning physicists, but we need biologists, computer experts and environmentalists as well. And I think academics and independent entrepreneurs have a special obligation because they have more freedom than those in government service, or company employees subject to commercial pressure. I wrote my book, "Our Final Century," as a scientist, just a general scientist. But there's one respect, I think, in which being a cosmologist offered a special perspective, and that's that it offers an awareness of the immense future. The stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture -- outside the American
Bible Belt, anyway ,but most people, even those who are familiar with evolution, aren't mindful that even more time lies ahead.
The sun has been shining for four and a half billion years, but it'll be another six billion years before its fuel runs out. On that schematic picture, a sort of time-lapse picture, we're halfway. And it'll be another six billion before that happens, and any remaining life on Earth is vaporized. There's an unthinking tendency to imagine that humans will be there, experiencing the sun's demise, but any life and intelligence that exists then will be as different from us as we are from bacteria. The unfolding of intelligence and complexity still has immensely far to go, here on Earth and probably far beyond. So we are still at the beginning of the emergence of complexity in our Earth and beyond. If you represent the Earth's lifetime by a single year, say from January when it was made to December, the
21st-century would be a quarter of a second in June -- a tiny fraction of the year. But even in this concertinaed cosmic perspective, our century is very, very special, the first when humans can change themselves and their home planet.
As I should have shown this earlier, it will not be humans who witness the end point of the sun; it will be creatures as different from us as we are from bacteria. When Einstein died in 1955, one striking tribute to his global status was this cartoon by Herblock in the Washington Post. The plaque reads,
"Albert Einstein lived here." And I'd like to end with a vignette, as it were, inspired by this image. We've been familiar for 40 years with this image: the fragile beauty of land, ocean and clouds, contrasted with the sterile moonscape on which the astronauts left their footprints. But let's suppose some aliens had been watching our pale blue dot in the cosmos from afar, not just for 40 years, but for the entire 4.5 billion-year history of our Earth. What would they have seen? Over nearly all that immense time,
Earth's appearance would have changed very gradually. The only abrupt worldwide change would have been major asteroid impacts or volcanic super-eruptions. Apart from those brief traumas, nothing happens suddenly.
The continental landmasses drifted around. Ice cover waxed and waned. Successions of new species emerged, evolved and became extinct. But in just a tiny sliver of the Earth's history, the last one-millionth part, a few thousand years, the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before.
This signaled the start of agriculture. Change has accelerated as human populations rose. Then other things happened even more abruptly. Within just 50 years -- that's one hundredth of one millionth of the Earth's age -- the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere started to rise, and ominously fast.
The planet became an intense emitter of radio waves -- the total output from all TV and cell phones and radar transmissions. And something else happened.
Metallic objects -- albeit very small ones, a few tons at most -- escaped into orbit around the Earth. Some journeyed to the moons and planets. A race of advanced extraterrestrials watching our solar system from afar could confidently predict Earth's final doom in another six billion years. But could they have predicted this unprecedented spike less than halfway through the Earth's life? These human-induced alterations occupying overall less than a millionth of the elapsed lifetime and seemingly occurring with runaway speed? If they continued their vigil, what might these hypothetical aliens witness in the next hundred years? Will some spasm foreclose Earth's future?
Or will the biosphere stabilize? Or will some of the metallic objects launched from the Earth spawn new oases, a post-human life elsewhere?
The science done by the young Einstein will continue as long as our civilization, but for civilization to survive, we'll need the wisdom of the old Einstein -- humane, global and farseeing. And whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate into the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth, far beyond the Earth as depicted here. Thank you very much.
(2625) |
|
京公网安备11010202008513号 京ICP证101109号 京ICP备12012021号
发表于 2012-12-23 00:03:17
收藏
收藏
，越障部分字数似乎应该是1510 
