在没有WiFi的情况下寻找外星人

在没有WiFi的情况下寻找外星人

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

对外星人的搜寻始于西维吉尼亚州中部。

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国家森林和阿勒格尼山脉之间的山谷里，坐落着西弗吉尼亚州格林班克小镇——人口143。我可以非常肯定地说，格林班克镇的居民比你现在所在的任何地方都要少。该镇最著名的外援是布鲁斯·博斯利，他是土生土长的当地人的儿子，后来在旧金山49人队四次成为职业球员。他是格林班克高中的一名明星，该校已被关闭并拆除。但是仍然矗立在485英尺高地方的是一个非同寻常的东西:格林班克望远镜和天文台。

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，在天文台里，我遇到了一位小学老师，他告诉我格林班克的孩子们过着一种更简单的生活，他们很少排队看Netflix，更多的是户外活动。(比如弄清楚镇上哪个角落的手机信号可能有效。)诺曼·洛克威尔在这里会觉得很自在。

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.

宁静和孤独使这个位于西弗吉尼亚州中部的山谷成为架设望远镜寻找外星人的最佳地点。科学家们想要听到来自外太空的无线电频率，尤其是那些来自我们星系之外的频率，需要完全的静音才能听到。一艘外星飞船可能正试图与我们交流，但如果来自发射塔的无形声波和奥维尔·雷登巴赫的微波炉爆米花发出的砰砰声挡住了我们的视线，我们将很难听到外星人在说什么。无线电静音区允许探测微弱的无线电频率信号，否则人造信号可能会掩盖这些信号。这就是世界上最大的完全可操纵的射电望远镜是如何在这里结束的——在一个偏僻的地方。

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，当一组科学家想出一个大胆的计划来监听外星人的无线电信号时，他们突袭了西弗吉尼亚州的格林班克也就不足为奇了。

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.

到目前为止，他们已经收集了1pb的数据，这听起来可能很多——确实如此。它大约有一百万字节的信息。在短短几年的时间里，他们已经观测到1300多颗相对较近的恒星，监听任何可能表明存在技术先进的外星人的无线电波信号。这只是可以研究的一小部分。长期从事外星人研究的吉尔·塔特说，如果你把我们能够搜索到的先进技术所占空间的体积与地球海洋的体积进行比较，那么“到目前为止，自1960年以来，我们已经搜索了相当于一个热水澡大小的海洋。”

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."

毕竟，让太空充满魅力的，不仅仅是去一个没有人去过的地方，而是去做这件事所需要的想象力、独创性和自信。正如天文学家卡尔·萨根的名言:“从最深刻的意义上说，对外星智能的探索就是对我们自己的探索。”