听力课堂TED音频栏目主要包括TED演讲的音频MP3及中英双语文稿，供各位英语爱好者学习使用。本文主要内容为演讲MP3+双语文稿:“超级高铁”背后的愿景，希望你会喜欢！

【主讲人】Josh Giegel
Josh Giegel 是超级高铁（Hyperloop，一种新形式高速运输系统）的首位乘客，他也是高性能火箭发动机、清洁能源领域的专家。超级高铁（Hyperloop）是一种新型的公共交通方式，旨在消除距离和时间的障碍。他对于工程的力量充满热情，致力于让人们用一种理想化的可持续的方式生活。

【演讲主题】Super speed, magnetic levitation and the vision behind the hyperloop
你是否希望几小时的通勤时间缩减至几分钟呢？
超级高铁（Hyperloop）或许能帮助你实现这一幻想。
演讲人讲述了这种快速创新如何引领我们享受到一个更便捷，更清洁的未来交通。

【中英文稿】

Imagine you're planning a trip up the coast, but instead of driving, you decide to hop into a vehicle shaped like a giant aluminum can. Your heart pounds as you strap yourself in. The air is stagnant. Beads of sweat are pooling on your brow as you prepare to launch. The vehicle starts to move. Before you know it, you're going 500 miles per hour. You hope that the people in control know what they're doing.

想象你正在打算去海边旅行，但你不开车去， 而是选择跳进一个巨大的像铝罐一样的交通工具里。 当你绑好安全带的时候，你的心砰砰的跳着。空气凝固了。正要出发的时候，大滴大滴的汗珠从你的额头落下。 这个交通工具开始启动了。在你意识到之前，其已经达到每小时500英里的速度。你希望那些控制的人知道他们正在做些什么。

Turns out that's just your average airplane experience. And 118 years ago, before the Wright brothers' first flight, the thought of humans flying was inconceivable -- crazy, even. Yet today, we get into a plane, 30,000 feet above the ground, and think nothing of it.

原来和一般搭乘飞机的经验没什么两样。在118年以前，即莱特兄弟试飞成功以前，飞行在当时的人看来不可思议，甚至疯狂。 然而现在我们却坐上了飞机，离地面三万英尺，不以为意。

A year after the Wright brothers' historic first flight, another inventor, an American physicist called Robert Goddard, proposed an entirely new form of transportation: the vactrain. He envisioned a high-speed mass transit system where people would travel on the ground, with little to no air resistance, inside of a tube. And today, these are some of the earliest renderings of what we call a hyperloop. So for those of you unfamiliar with the hyperloop, this is the chance we get to geek out together a bit.

距离莱特兄弟完成历史性的首次飞行一年以后，另一个发明家——美国发明家、物理学家罗伯特·戈达德提出了一种全新的交通模式：空气动力火车。他构思了一种高速公共运输系统人们乘坐它就能在地面上旅行了，在管子里几乎没有空气阻力。而现在，这些早期的设计构想 其实是超级高铁的原型。所以对于不熟悉超级高铁的人来说，这是一个值得我们共同探讨的话题。

So hyperloop is a transit system that has a vehicle called a pod inside of a tube about the same size as a subway tunnel, where we suck most, but not all of the air out of it, making it the equivalent of flying at about 200,000 feet of altitude. This allows us to glide at airline speeds, without turbulence, for a fraction of the energy consumption, about one tenth, to be precise, of an aircraft. And that's important, because we, as humans, have an innate need for speed. But this obsession with speed and volume is destroying the planet around us. In fact, in the United States, the transportation industry is the single largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. A hyperloop system can begin to change this trend before the end of the decade, by transforming short-haul journeys and commutes from hours to minutes. Our system is inspiring a new category of companies dedicated to bringing this to life. But it's going to take more than just vision. History's full of ideas that have flopped and flourished, and this one's just too important for us not to get right.

超级高铁是一个运输系统，在管道的内部有一个和地铁隧道同样大小叫做吊舱的工具，大部分的，但并不是全部，空气被抽出。这种感觉类似于在 约20万英尺的高度飞行。让我们可以在没有湍流的情况下以飞行的速度滑行，只消耗飞行的部分能源，准确来讲，消耗了大约十分之一 飞机飞行所需要的能源。这非常重要，因为我们人类对于速度有着一种本能的追求。但这种对于速度和总量的过分追求正在破坏周边的环境。事实上，在美国，交通运输行业是温室气体排放最大的罪人。超级高铁系统可以在本世纪末之前开始改变这种趋势，方法是将短途旅行和通勤从几小时转变为几分钟。我们的系统正在激发新类别的公司致力于使其成为现实。仅仅有愿景是不够的。历史充满了失败和繁荣的想法，这个非常重要，我们不能搞砸。

So I am an engineer, and I am insatiably curious and always love a good problem. So in 2013, when Elon Musk released the "Hyperloop Alpha" white paper, of course, I was going to give it a read. It sketched out an idea with an open invitation for anyone to take it from a concept and design it to reality. We decided to not only make it tangible but make it safe, sustainable and economically viable. And we were so convinced that we could make it work that I quit my job to build it. I thought I was being optimistic. My wife, on the other hand, thought I was completely delusional. Either way, we heard over and over that building a functional hyperloop was unrealistic. But for each "no" we heard, we dove deeper and deeper into the science and the engineering and showed that it was in fact possible, but it was going to be no easy feat for us to build something that had never existed.

我是一名工程师， 我的好奇心很强，喜欢好问题。 在2013年，当埃隆·马斯克发布了 “超级高铁初构想”白皮书以后， 当然，我打算去读一遍。 这份白皮书公开邀请 那些能够从其概念入手， 并将其转化为现实的人。 于是我们决定不仅要把它设计出来， 还要将它设计得安全、可持续， 并且在经济上可行。 我们坚信我们能够成功， 我辞了职，着手去打造这个项目。 我以为我很乐观。 然后，我的妻子却认为我 完全是在痴心妄想。 不管怎样，总有些人老和我们说 打造一个实用的超级高铁 是不现实的。 纵然他人质疑不断， 我们始终潜心钻研科学和工程， 为了去证明超级高铁 事实上是可以建造出来的。 但是建造一个从不存在的事物着实有点困难。

So our early prototypes started with the traditional concept that maglev uses, that is, where the track controls the vehicle. But something about that just wasn't quite right for a hyperloop system. So for months, I had been noodling on how to make our system future-proof. And while I was on a bike ride in the mountains above Los Angeles, I came around a bend. A 1933 Ford Roadster followed by a Tesla Model S passed me. Those two cars are light-years different in technology, yet they drive on the same passive road. And there it was. Smart vehicle, dumb road. Or in the case of a hyperloop, smart pod, dumb tube. So technology has made it possible that a car can be modular, upgradeable and future-proof, while the road stays pretty much the same. So for a hyperloop, our tube is passive and simple, like the road, but our modular pods can evolve as technology advances, just like the automobile.

所以我们最初的原型 是从磁悬浮使用的传统观念开始的， 即轨道控制着车辆。 但用在超级高铁系统上 总是有点不对劲。 几个月来我一直在想 该怎样让我们的系统 去经受未来的考验。 有天我正在洛杉矶的山上骑自行车， 来到了一个转弯处。 1933年的福特跑车和特斯拉S型汽车 先后从我身边经过。 这两辆车所应用的技术差距很大， 然而它们都在相同的 被动式道路上行驶。 那里有 智能汽车搭配着笨笨的路。 或是在超级高铁的例子中， 智能车厢搭配着笨笨的管道。 换言之，技术使得 汽车的模板化、更新换代、 未来化成真， 而道路始终保持不变。 对于超级高铁来说， 管道是被动、简单的，像马路一样， 而我们的模块化乘坐感应系统 随着技术的更新不断完善， 就像汽车一样。

So we now had our vision. The next thing we had to do is assemble the team. So we've all seen a "Mission Impossible" movie in this room, and there's always a scene in those movies where someone lays out a task or plan calmly. But what they lay out is completely and totally insane. So for a hyperloop, our mission that we've chosen to accept is to build the world's largest vacuum structures, devise new passive magnetic guideways, create pods capable of withstanding a space environment, powered by next-generation batteries while levitating using state-of-the-art magnetic levitation, while quietly accelerating, using the world's most efficient linear electric motor.

我们现在有了自己的愿景。 下一步我们所要做的就是 集合团队。 此地每个人都看过 “职业特工队”这部电影， 电影中总会有这么一幕： 其中一个人冷静地安排好计划。 但他们所列出来的方案 是极度不合理的。 至于超级高铁， 我们选择去接受的使命 是去打造世界上最大的真空结构， 设计全新的被动式磁化导轨， 创造能够承受太空环境的吊舱， 由下一代电池供电， 在使用最先进的磁悬浮 以及悄悄加速的同时， 运转世界上最高效的直线电机。

Everyone turns to the engineer. I have to make that possible, or we have to make that possible. Luckily for us, we have more than just one of those engineers, we have a few hundred that have designed reusable rockets, spaceships, autonomous aircraft, electric vehicles, AI systems and loads of other cool things.

每一个人都仰赖工程师。 我必须要让这成为可能， 我们必须要让这成为可能。 辛运的是， 我们有不止一位这样的工程师， 我们有上百位， 能够设计可回收火箭、宇宙飞船、 自动飞行器、电动汽车、 人工智能系统， 还有很多其他很酷的东西。

And after building that system, we created a test track in the desert outside of Las Vegas. We've operated the system over 500 times and had countless other tests on our subsystems. But there was one test that was going to be the defining moment for hyperloop technology: the first passengers in the vehicle. And we were going to do it with regular people that didn't need years of training and experience to set foot inside of a space capsule. So by October of 2020, we had run hundreds of tests, some with these extremely handsome mannequins that you see here. We had an independent safety auditor give us the green light, but still, it was nerve-racking. We were boldly going where only these handsome mannequins had gone before. And on November 8th, 2020, we made our first attempt. So at our test site, my colleague Sara and I climbed into that can-like vehicle suspended by magnetic levitation at a near-vacuum environment, and the countdown began. In those 15 seconds, we showed the world that what was deemed ludicrous over 100 years ago was in fact possible. That brief moment has opened so many doors for us. We've had conversations in the US, Europe, India, the Middle East, about building hyperloop systems in the next 10 years. This is the start of a systemic change in the way we travel.

我们建造完这个系统以后， 在拉斯维加斯的沙漠外端 创造了高速试验轨道。 该系统已经运转超过500次了， 我们还对子系统进行了无数次测试。 但只有那一次试验 对超级高铁来说 是一次决定性的时刻： 高铁上坐着第一批乘客。 我们打算利用普通人来进行试验。 踏入太空舱不需要 多年的训练和经验。 在2020年10月以前， 我们已经进行了数百次的测试， 一些试验是利用这些你所看见的 好看的人体模型进行的。 尽管有位独立的安全审计员 让我们进行， 但仍然让人焦虑。 我们大胆地前去 以前只有这些漂亮的人体模特 去过的地方。 在2020年11月8日 我们第一次尝试。 我和一位叫做萨拉的同事， 从试验场地 来到一个近乎真空的环境中， 爬进一个罐头状的磁悬浮列车里， 倒数计时开始了。 在那15秒， 我们向世界证明了 那个100年以来人们认为荒唐的构想 实际上是有可能实现的。 短暂的一刹那却为我们 打开了许多扇门。 我们与美国、欧洲、印度、 中东各方对话， 谈的是在未来 10 年 构建超级高铁系统。 这我们出行方式 发生系统性改变的开始。

Simply put, society has moved forward, as we've moved faster. The railroad ushered in the industrial revolution, the airplane forever changed the way we move. But today, we’re at an inflection point. Nations around the world are looking for ways to reduce carbon emissions, but at the same time, we need to get where we're going in minutes, not hours. We also need to invest in infrastructure that can meet the needs of the 21st century, and beyond.

简言之， 社会的发展加快， 我们的步伐也加快了。 铁路引领了产业革命， 飞机永远地改变了我们的出行方式。 而现在，我们正处于一个转折口。 世界各国都在寻找 减少碳排放的方法， 与此同时， 我们需要在几分钟内到达目的地， 而不是花费几小时的时间。 我们还需要去投资那些能够满足 21世纪和以后需求的基础设施。

And so my hope for a hyperloop system is that it can transform the way that we live -- we can live where we want to live, work where we want to work, we can create a world in which your daughter, who lives in Los Angeles, can go surfing in Santa Cruz and be home in time for lunch. A world in which 150 million people can live in Mumbai and travel to Pune, the equivalent distance of Philadelphia to New York, in 30 minutes, not four hours, while saving 1.1 million tons of pollution each and every year.

因此，我希望超级高铁系统能够转变我们生活的方式 ——让我们能够在心仪的环境下 生活、工作， 创造的世界是你住在洛杉矶的女儿可以去圣克鲁兹冲浪， 还在冲完浪后能够准时回家吃午饭。 在这里，1.5亿人能在孟买生活去普纳旅游， 相当于从费城到纽约的距离， 30分钟就到了，而不是4个小时， 同时减少了每年110万吨的污染量。

The last century started with two people riding on a plane, and it ended with millions of people flying all over the world. This decade started with two people riding on a hyperloop system, and my hope is that by the end of it, you'll ride one too.

上个世纪从两个人乘坐飞机开始， 到世界各地数百万人的飞行而结束。 而这十年从两个人乘坐超级高铁开始， 我希望在十年结束之前， 你们都能够坐上超级高铁。

Thank you.

谢谢。