國家地理:送給外星人的地圖(6)

Several years ago, two significant things happened. I found the original, penciled-in pulsar map, folded away and casually tucked into a tomato box in my parents' closet. And I linked up with a rock climber named Scott Ransom, one of the world's more prolific pulsar astronomers.

幾年前發(fā)生了兩件重要的事。其一，我找到了這幅脈沖星地圖用鉛筆繪制的原本，它被折起來，隨意放在我父母櫥柜里放西紅柿的容器內(nèi)。其二，是我和一位喜好攀巖的男子斯考特·蘭森有了交集，他也是世界上對脈沖星鉆研最深的天文學(xué)家之一。

Scott had been thinking about the Voyagers, the "golden record," and the pulsar map since he was a 10-year-old in Mansfield, Ohio, watching Carl's Cosmos television show. Some years and an astronomy Ph.D. later, he realized that Dad's map has a near-future expiration date. Its Achilles' heel is the same property that lets it pinpoint Earth in time: Pulsars slow down, and the ones Dad had chosen (from the few known at the time) would fade and disappear within several million years, give or take a few millennia.

自從十歲在俄亥俄州曼斯菲爾德家中看到卡爾的電視節(jié)目《宇宙》之后，斯考特就一直在考慮著有關(guān)旅行者號、“金唱片”和脈沖星地圖的事情。多年之后，斯考特取得了天文學(xué)博士學(xué)位，他開始意識到我父親的這幅地圖在不久的未來就會失效。這幅地圖的致命缺陷恰恰源自能讓它準(zhǔn)確指出地球時間維度的同一個特性：脈沖星自轉(zhuǎn)速度會減慢，而我父親從當(dāng)時已知的少數(shù)脈沖星中挑選出的那一些，會在幾百萬年內(nèi)消失，誤差大約在幾千年。

Coincidentally, Scott had set out to make a new, more precise, and longer-lived pulsar map even before we moved in together and portmanteau'd ourselves into the Dranksomes. Now I write the words that tell our stories, and Scott does the important cartographic stuff such as choosing pulsars and deriving their binary codes. He occasionally drafts some text passages, but you'll never catch me committing academic acts of astronomy.

巧的是，早在我們同居并將彼此的姓氏合并成德瑞克森前，斯考特就已著手繪制一幅更精確、能使用更久的新脈沖星地圖。如今我負(fù)責(zé)書寫我們的故事，斯考特則負(fù)責(zé)重要的制圖工作，例如挑選脈沖星并推算它們的二進(jìn)制編碼。他偶爾會起草一些文章段落，但你永遠(yuǎn)不會看到我在進(jìn)行天文學(xué)的學(xué)術(shù)研究。