一項令人不安的研究發(fā)現(xiàn)，人們根本不在乎人類是否會滅絕

一項令人不安的研究發(fā)現(xiàn)，人們根本不在乎人類是否會滅絕

Forget nuclear weapons, biological warfare, and the slew of other ways humanity could cause its own destruction for a moment.

暫時忘記核武器、生物戰(zhàn)和其他可能導(dǎo)致人類自身毀滅的方式吧。

If you take into account only naturally occurring phenomena — supervolcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, and the like — researchers from the University of Oxford recently determined that the probability of our entire species going extinct in any given year could be as high as one in 14,000 (although it's probably closer to 1 in 87,000).

如果只考慮自然發(fā)生的現(xiàn)象——超級火山爆發(fā)、小行星撞擊等等——牛津大學的研究人員最近確定，在任何一年里，我們整個物種滅絕的概率都可能高達14000分之一(盡管可能接近187000分之一)。

Now consider this: In October, a separate team from Oxford published its own paper on human extinction in the journal Scientific Reports — and it found that people don't seem to see the loss of humanity as uniquely tragic.

現(xiàn)在想想這個:10月份，牛津大學的一個獨立團隊在《科學報告》雜志上發(fā)表了一篇關(guān)于人類滅絕的論文，他們發(fā)現(xiàn)人們似乎并不認為人類的滅絕是獨一無二的悲劇。

The second group of researchers asked more than 2,500 people in the United States and the United Kingdom to rank three possible scenarios from best to worst: no major catastrophe, a catastrophe that wipes out 80 percent of the human population, and a catastrophe that causes complete human extinction.

第二組研究人員要求美國和英國的2500多人將三種可能的情況從好到壞進行排序：沒有重大災(zāi)難，一場毀滅80%人口的災(zāi)難，以及一場導(dǎo)致人類徹底滅絕的災(zāi)難。

As you might expect, most people ranked no catastrophe as the best possibility and complete human extinction as the worst. But when asked to think about the difference in "badness" between the possibilities, most people were more bothered by the possibility of losing 80 percent of humanity than losing all of it.

正如你所料，大多數(shù)人認為沒有災(zāi)難是最好的可能性，而完全人類滅絕是最壞的。但當被要求思考兩種可能性之間“壞”的區(qū)別時，大多數(shù)人更擔心失去80%人類的可能性，而不是失去所有人類。

"Thus, when asked in the most straightforward and unqualified way," the researchers wrote, "participants do not find human extinction uniquely bad."

“因此，當以最直接、最不合格的方式提問時，”研究人員寫道，“參與者并不認為人類滅絕是唯一的壞事。”

When the researchers switched the whole scenario to focus on an animal species, though, survey respondents saw the loss of all zebras as worse than the loss of 80 percent of zebras.

然而，當研究人員把整個場景轉(zhuǎn)到一個動物物種上時，被調(diào)查者認為所有斑馬的消失比80%的斑馬消失更糟糕。

The issue, it seems, is that survey respondents focused a lot on the individual human lives lost in scenario two — and how the deaths might affect those left behind — rather than on the loss of humanity as a whole.

問題似乎在于，調(diào)查對象把很多注意力集中在情景二中失去的個人生命——以及死亡可能對留守者造成的影響——而不是整個人類的喪失。

In other words, we tend to think of a world without any zebras as more tragic than a world in which most zebras die. But for humankind, most people believe the reverse.

換句話說，我們傾向于認為沒有斑馬的世界比大多數(shù)斑馬死亡的世界更悲慘。但對于人類來說，大多數(shù)人的想法恰恰相反。

There was a way to get survey respondents to consider the loss of our entire species as uniquely bad, though: the researchers just had to tell them humanity would be missing out on a long future existence that was "better than today in every conceivable way."

有一種方法讓調(diào)查者把我們整個物種的損失視為一種極不好的結(jié)果：盡管如此，研究人員只需告訴他們，人類將錯過一個長期存在的“比任何時候都能想到的更好的生存方式”。

While there's seemingly little we could do to prevent an asteroid impact or a volcanic eruption, humanity does have a say in whether we fall victim to nuclear war and the like — and knowing that people are more likely to care about our species' potential downfall if they're feeling optimistic about our future could play a role in making sure we don't go down one of those self-destructive paths.

雖然我們似乎無法阻止小行星撞擊或火山爆發(fā)，但人類確實有權(quán)決定我們是否會成為核戰(zhàn)爭等的犧牲品，并且知道如果人們對我們的未來感到樂觀，他們更可能關(guān)心我們物種的潛在衰亡，從而確保我們不要走那種自我毀滅的道路。

"People are going to have a lot of influence over what we're going to do [about the threats of human extinction in our near future]," Stefan Schubert, co-author of the survey paper, recently told Vox. "So it's important to find out how people think about them."

調(diào)查報告的合著者斯特凡·舒伯特(Stefan Schubert)最近在接受美國之音采訪時說：“人們將對我們將要做的(關(guān)于人類近期滅絕威脅的)事情產(chǎn)生很大影響。”因此，了解人們對他們的看法很重要。”