國家地理:送給外星人的地圖(3)

Carl asked Dad for help crafting the message while the two of them were in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Dad recalls that, in the lobby of the San Gerónimo Hilton, he and Carl quickly came up with ideas about what to include: line drawings depicting humans, a rendering of the spacecraft -- and then, "in the next moment, we hit on the idea of a galactic map that would pinpoint the location of the Earth in space."

在參加于波多黎各的圣胡安舉辦的美國天文學會的一次會議時，卡爾請父親幫忙設(shè)計該信息。父親回憶說，在圣杰洛尼摩希爾頓酒店的大廳里，他和卡爾很快提出了該信息應(yīng)包含的內(nèi)容的想法：描繪人類的線圖、宇宙飛船的渲染圖，“但就在接下來的一瞬間，我們突然想到了一張能確定地球在宇宙中位置的銀河地圖的這個主意?！?/p>

Dad designed that map, and in 1972 it flew into space aboard Pioneer 10. The next year Pioneer 11 launched, ultimately carrying the map past Saturn and now on to the stars. Then in 1977 both Voyager spacecraft left Earth carrying Dad's guide to finding our planet, which is etched onto the cover of the "golden record." The way Dad designed the map means that it points back to Earth both in space and in time, making it a galactic positioning system (a different kind of GPS) in four dimensions.

隨后父親就開始設(shè)計這張地圖，并在1972年先將其放入“先驅(qū)者10號”，使其進入了太空。第二年，“先驅(qū)者11號”發(fā)射升空，又帶著這張地圖掠過土星，現(xiàn)在正飛往其他星球。隨后，在1977年，兩艘“旅行者號”飛船搭載著父親指引我們星球方位的地圖飛離了地球，該地圖被刻在了“金唱片”的封面上。父親設(shè)計這張地圖的方式，是使其在空間和時間上都指向地球，成為一個四維的銀河定位系統(tǒng)（一種不同的GPS）。

At the time, Dad and Carl didn't really worry that the aliens who found their message in a bottle might be of the more malevolent variety.

在那時，父親和卡爾并不擔心，那些在瓶子里發(fā)現(xiàn)了他們的信息的外星人，可能是非常邪惡的外星人。