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Arthur C. Clarke 阿瑟 克拉克
Mar 27th 2008
From The Economist print edition
译者：vivienne_v
Sir Arthur C. Clarke, visionary, died on March 18th, aged 90

ALTHOUGH he dreamed and wrote about it constantly for 70 years, Arthur C. Clarke never voyaged into space. He came closest to visiting alien worlds through his love of deep-sea diving, its weightlessness and strange life forms. But he always looked upwards with a gleam in his eye, hoping for the real thing. "I can never look now at the Milky Way", said the narrator in "The Sentinel", "without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long."

70年来，虽然不曾间断过关于太空的梦想和写作，阿瑟•C•克拉克却从未在星际航行过。他热爱深海潜水，水下的失重状态和千奇百怪的生命体给了他最接近漫游外太空的感觉。但他那清亮的目光总是投向太空，希望在那里发现生命的痕迹。他在《岗哨》中写道："每当我仰望银河系那些成团堆积的星云，总是好奇天外的使者会自哪个星球来。如果你能宽容地接受这样的老生常谈，那么我们就已经拉响了警报，剩下的事就只有等待了。我想我们的等待不会太久。"

Did Sir Arthur believe in extra-terrestrials? The answer was given with a smile. "Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." And UFOs? A broader smile. "They tell us absolutely nothing about intelligence elsewhere in the universe, but they do prove how rare it is on Earth." For all his star-gazing, Sir Arthur's feet were firmly on the ground.

　　阿瑟爵士相信外太空生命吗？他面带微笑答道："存在两种可能：我们或者孤独地存在于宇宙中，或者并不孤独。这两种可能性同样可怕。"那不明飞行物呢？他笑得更厉害了："它们并不能说明宇宙的其他地方是否存在智能生命，但对于不明飞行物的种种观点只不过证明了地球上的聪明人也不多。"虽然思索着星际问题，阿瑟爵士却脚踏实地。

He did not predict the future in his copious science fiction, he insisted. He simply extrapolated. After all, he had written six stories about the end of the Earth; they couldn't all be true. The point was never to say what would happen for certain, but to ask what might happen; to prepare people painlessly for the future and to encourage flexible thinking. Politicians, he thought, ought to read his books rather than westerns or detective stories, because imagination could pave the way for revolutionary practical ideas.

In 1945, a year before he began to read physics and mathematics at King's College, he set out in the British magazine Wireless World the principles of global communication using satellites. The idea was two decades ahead of its time, and helped to attach his name to the geostationary orbit above the equator. In 1962, at the chilliest part of the cold war and just after the launch of Sputnik had heralded the space age, he discussed in "Profiles of the Future" the implications of transatlantic satellite radio and television broadcasts, with information raining down on previously isolated parts of the world. "Men will become neighbours," he wrote. "Whether they like it or not...The TV satellite is mightier than the ICBM."

　　1945年，即他开始在国王学院攻读物理和数学的前一年，他在英国《无线电世界》杂志上发表了一篇关于全球卫星通信原理的文章。他的想法先于卫星通信时代20年，赤道上的地球同步卫星轨道因此以他的名字命名。预告太空时代到来的苏联人造地球卫星（Sputnik）发射不久、冷战最严峻的年代1962年，他在《未来的轮廓》（Profiles of the Future）里探讨了跨大西洋卫星无线电及电视转播对于把资讯传播到原本互不关联的世界各地的意义。他写道："不管人们愿不愿意，彼此都成了邻居......电视卫星比洲际弹道导弹（ICBM）更有威力。"

He also got things wrong, of course. He predicted that humans would land on Mars-by 1994, then by 2010. In the early days, he also believed that a human presence in space would be important for work such as servicing satellites. His cosmic visions left him with little patience for lowlier, grittier issues of politics and economics. Those, he wrote, were concerned with "power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary...concern of full-grown men". To him, it seemed self-evident that humanity would welcome the technological path towards evolution, whatever the cost. "The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers-and thermonuclear weapons."

　　当然，他也出过错。他预言人类将登陆火星，登陆时间是在1994年之前，后来又说在2010年之前。早年，他还相信人类留在太空会发挥重要作用，比如进行卫星的维护保养。他的宇宙视野使他对既现实又纷杂的政治和经济事务毫无耐心。他写道，那些事务"与权力和财富有关，而权力和财富都不应该是心智成熟的人最关心的事。" 对他而言不证自明的是，无论成本多大，以技术引领人类进化是符合人性的。"恐龙灭绝是因为它们不能适应变化了的环境。如果我们不能适应一个已经包含了宇宙飞船、电脑和热核武器的环境，我们也会灭绝。"

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