翻译硕士考研者，在暑期阶段需要看双语阅读文章，来提升阅读水平和翻译能力。下面，北京文都考研网为助力翻译硕士学子们在备考上一臂之力，整理了MTI双语阅读精选文章:怎么才能找到外星人?供考生参考。
2020考研MTI双语阅读精选:怎么才能找到外星人?
“IF ALIENS are so likely, why have we never seen any?” That is the Fermi Paradox—named after Enrico Fermi, a physicist who posed it in 1950.
“如果外星人很有可能存在，为什么我们从未见过外星人?”这就是费米悖论 - 以1950年提出它的物理学家恩里科·费米命名。
Fermi’s argument ran as follows. The laws of nature supported the emergence of intelligent life on Earth. Those laws are the same throughout the universe. The universe contains zillions of stars and planets. So, even if life is unlikely to arise on any particular astronomical body, the sheer abundance of creation suggests the night sky should be full of alien civilizations. Fermi wondered why aliens had never visited Earth. Today, the paradox is more usually cast in light of the inability of radio-telescope searches to detect the equivalent of the radio waves that leak from Earth into the cosmos, and have done for the past century.
费米有这么一个观点：自然法则支持地球上智慧生命的出现。那些法则同样适用于整个宇宙。宇宙中有数以万计的恒星和行星。因此，即使生命不可能出现在任何特定的天文体上，纯粹的创造也意味着地球外的星空充满了外星文明。费米想知道为什么外星人从未到过地球。如今，无线电望远镜一个世纪以来都搜索不到与地球泄漏到宇宙中的一样无线电波，这让费米悖论备受怀疑。
Thinking up answers to this apparent contradiction has become something of a scientific parlour game. Perhaps life is really very unlikely. Perhaps the priests are right: human beings were put on Earth by some creator God for His own inscrutable purposes, and the rest of the universe is merely background scenery. Perhaps there are plenty of aliens, but they have decided that discretion is a safer bet than gregariousness. Or perhaps galactic society avoids communicating with Earth specifically. One chilling idea is that technological civilisations destroy themselves before they can make their presence known. They might blow themselves up after inventing nuclear weapons (an invention that, on Earth, Fermi had been part of), or cook themselves to death by over-burning fossil fuels.
思考这个悖论的答案成为一种科学游戏。也许外星生命真的不太可能寻在。也许神父们是对的：出于一些难以捉摸的目的，上帝把人类安放在地球上，而宇宙的其它部分仅仅是陪衬。也许存在有很多外星人，但他们认为与人类保持距离比贸然与之联系更安全。或许整个宇宙社会是避开与地球进行沟通。一个令人不寒而栗的想法是：外星文明的存在被人类知晓之前，就自我毁灭了。他们可能由于发明了核武器(在地球上，费米参与的一项发明奖)，或者由于过度燃烧化石燃料，而自我毁灭了。
In a paper published last month on arXiv, an online repository, a trio of astronomers at Pennsylvania State University have analysed the history of alien-hunting and come to a different conclusion. In effect, they reject one of the paradox’s main pillars. Astronomers have seen no sign of aliens, argue Jason Wright and his colleagues, because they have not been looking hard enough.
上月发表在在线资料库预印本平台(arXiv)上的一篇论文中，宾夕法尼亚州立大学的三位天文学家分析了人类寻找外星人的历史，并得出了不同的结论。实际上，他们拒绝接受悖论的主要理论支柱之一。杰森赖特和他的同事们认为，天文学家们之所以没有找到外星人，是因为他们没有尽力去找。
Dr Wright’s argument echoes that made by another astronomer, Jill Tarter, in 2010. Dr Tarter reckoned that decades of searching had amounted to the equivalent of dipping a drinking glass into Earth’s oceans at random to see if it contained a fish. Dr Wright and his colleagues built on Dr Tarter’s work to come up with a model that tries to estimate the amount of searching that alien-hunters have managed so far. They considered nine variables, including how distant any putative aliens are likely to be, the sensitivity of telescopes, how big a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum they are able to scan and the time spent doing so. Once the numbers had been crunched, the researchers reckoned humanity has done slightly better than Dr Tarter suggested. Rather than dipping a drinking glass into the ocean, they say, astronomers have dunked a bathtub. The upshot is that it is too early to assume no aliens exist. Fermi’s question is, for now at least, not a true paradox.
赖特博士的论点与另一位天文学家吉尔塔特在2010年的观点相呼应。塔特博士认为，数十年的搜索相当于随意地将一个水杯浸入地球上的海洋，看它是否能捞到鱼。赖特博士和他的同事们在塔特博士的工作基础上提出了一个模型，以估算出迄今为止人类寻找外星人方面所进行的搜索量。他们考虑了九个变量，包括外星人可能有多远，望远镜的灵敏度，他们能够扫描多大范围的电磁频谱以及花费的时间。一旦数字测算出来了，研究人员认为人类的表现略好于塔特博士的估算。他们说，天文学家不是将饮用水杯浸入海中，而是将浴缸放在了海洋里。结果是认为没有外星人存在还为时过早。到目前为止，费米猜想题至少不是一个真正的悖论。
以上是北京文都考研网给出的“2020考研MTI双语阅读精选文章:怎么才能找到外星人?”，希望对翻译硕士考生有所帮助!祝2020考研金榜题名!
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