在沒有WiFi的情況下尋找外星人

在沒有WiFi的情況下尋找外星人

The search for aliens starts in the middle of nowhere. In West Virginia.

對外星人的搜尋始于西維吉尼亞州中部。

In a valley between the Monongahela National Forest and the Allegheny Mountains lies the small town of Green Bank, West Virginia — population 143. I can pretty much guarantee that the town of Green Bank is less inhabited than wherever you are right now. The town's most famous export was Bruce Bosley, a native son who went on to become a four-time All-Pro with the San Francisco 49ers. He was a star running back at Green Bank High School, which has since been closed and demolished. But what's still standing, at 485 feet tall, is something extraordinary: the Green Bank Telescope and Observatory.

在Monongahela國家森林和阿勒格尼山脈之間的山谷里，坐落著西弗吉尼亞州格林班克小鎮(zhèn)——人口143。我可以非?？隙ǖ卣f，格林班克鎮(zhèn)的居民比你現(xiàn)在所在的任何地方都要少。該鎮(zhèn)最著名的外援是布魯斯·博斯利，他是土生土長的當(dāng)?shù)厝说膬鹤?，后來在舊金山49人隊四次成為職業(yè)球員。他是格林班克高中的一名明星，該校已被關(guān)閉并拆除。但是仍然矗立在485英尺高地方的是一個非同尋常的東西:格林班克望遠(yuǎn)鏡和天文臺。

I posed with a smaller version of the telescope in the parking lot of the Green Bank Observatory. (Photo: Elizabeth Cohen)

Inside the observatory, on this Friday afternoon, I meet an elementary school teacher who tells me that kids in Green Bank enjoy a simpler life, one filled less with Netflix queues and more with outdoor activities. (Like figuring out which corner of town might have a working cell signal.) Norman Rockwell would feel right at home here.

周五下午，在天文臺里，我遇到了一位小學(xué)老師，他告訴我格林班克的孩子們過著一種更簡單的生活，他們很少排隊看Netflix，更多的是戶外活動。(比如弄清楚鎮(zhèn)上哪個角落的手機(jī)信號可能有效。)諾曼·洛克威爾在這里會覺得很自在。

God's Ark of Safety is a Christian ministry that's building a 450-foot recreation of Noah's Ark on the side of the highway. (Photo: Benyamin Cohen)

The peace and solitude are what makes this valley in central West Virginia the optimal spot to set up a telescope to search for aliens. Scientists looking to hear radio frequencies from outer space — especially those coming from beyond our galaxy — need perfect silence to do their listening. An alien spaceship may be trying to communicate with us, but it'll be hard to pick up what the extraterrestrials are saying if invisible sound waves from cell towers and the pop-pop-pop of Orville Redenbacher's microwave popcorn gets in the way. The Radio Quiet Zone allows for the detection of faint radio frequency signals that man-made signals might otherwise mask. And that's how the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope ended up here — in the middle of nowhere.

寧靜和孤獨(dú)使這個位于西弗吉尼亞州中部的山谷成為架設(shè)望遠(yuǎn)鏡尋找外星人的最佳地點(diǎn)。科學(xué)家們想要聽到來自外太空的無線電頻率，尤其是那些來自我們星系之外的頻率，需要完全的靜音才能聽到。一艘外星飛船可能正試圖與我們交流，但如果來自發(fā)射塔的無形聲波和奧維爾·雷登巴赫的微波爐爆米花發(fā)出的砰砰聲擋住了我們的視線，我們將很難聽到外星人在說什么。無線電靜音區(qū)允許探測微弱的無線電頻率信號，否則人造信號可能會掩蓋這些信號。這就是世界上最大的完全可操縱的射電望遠(yuǎn)鏡是如何在這里結(jié)束的——在一個偏僻的地方。

Wireless communications signals are banned to prevent transmissions interfering with the radio telescopes in the area. (Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)

So it's no wonder that when a team of scientists hatched an audacious plan to listen for radio signals from aliens, they descended on Green Bank, West Virginia.

因此，當(dāng)一組科學(xué)家想出一個大膽的計劃來監(jiān)聽外星人的無線電信號時，他們突襲了西弗吉尼亞州的格林班克也就不足為奇了。

The telescope sits in the U.S. National Radio Quiet Zone, a unique area located in the town of Green Bank, West Virginia. (Photo: NRAO/AUI/Wikimedia)

So far, they have collected one petabyte of data, which may sound like a lot — and it is. It's about a million gigabytes of information. They have observed more than 1,300 relatively nearby stars over the course of just a few years, listening for any signs of radio waves that would signal the presence of technologically advanced aliens. This only amounts to a tiny sliver of what could be studied. If you compare the volume of space we're able to search for signs of advanced technology to the volume of the Earth's oceans, then "so far since 1960, we've searched about one hot tub's worth of the ocean," says Jill Tarter, a longtime alien researcher.

到目前為止，他們已經(jīng)收集了1pb的數(shù)據(jù)，這聽起來可能很多——確實(shí)如此。它大約有一百萬字節(jié)的信息。在短短幾年的時間里，他們已經(jīng)觀測到1300多顆相對較近的恒星，監(jiān)聽任何可能表明存在技術(shù)先進(jìn)的外星人的無線電波信號。這只是可以研究的一小部分。長期從事外星人研究的吉爾·塔特說，如果你把我們能夠搜索到的先進(jìn)技術(shù)所占空間的體積與地球海洋的體積進(jìn)行比較，那么“到目前為止，自1960年以來，我們已經(jīng)搜索了相當(dāng)于一個熱水澡大小的海洋。”

Yuri Milner and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking explained the $100 million global initiative to reinvigorate the search for life in the universe at The Royal Society in London in 2015. (Photo: Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images)

What makes space glamorous, after all, is not the mere act of getting to where no one has gone before, but the imagination, ingenuity, and hubris required to do it. As astronomer Carl Sagan famously said, "In the deepest sense, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves."

畢竟，讓太空充滿魅力的，不僅僅是去一個沒有人去過的地方，而是去做這件事所需要的想象力、獨(dú)創(chuàng)性和自信。正如天文學(xué)家卡爾·薩根的名言:“從最深刻的意義上說，對外星智能的探索就是對我們自己的探索。”