一项令人不安的研究发现，人们根本不在乎人类是否会灭绝

一项令人不安的研究发现，人们根本不在乎人类是否会灭绝

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

暂时忘记核武器、生物战和其他可能导致人类自身毁灭的方式吧。

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).

如果只考虑自然发生的现象——超级火山爆发、小行星撞击等等——牛津大学的研究人员最近确定，在任何一年里，我们整个物种灭绝的概率都可能高达14000分之一(尽管可能接近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.

现在想想这个:10月份，牛津大学的一个独立团队在《科学报告》杂志上发表了一篇关于人类灭绝的论文，他们发现人们似乎并不认为人类的灭绝是独一无二的悲剧。

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.

第二组研究人员要求美国和英国的2500多人将三种可能的情况从好到坏进行排序：没有重大灾难，一场毁灭80%人口的灾难，以及一场导致人类彻底灭绝的灾难。

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，大多数人认为没有灾难是最好的可能性，而完全人类灭绝是最坏的。但当被要求思考两种可能性之间“坏”的区别时，大多数人更担心失去80%人类的可能性，而不是失去所有人类。

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

“因此，当以最直接、最不合格的方式提问时，”研究人员写道，“参与者并不认为人类灭绝是唯一的坏事。”

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，当研究人员把整个场景转到一个动物物种上时，被调查者认为所有斑马的消失比80%的斑马消失更糟糕。

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.

问题似乎在于，调查对象把很多注意力集中在情景二中失去的个人生命——以及死亡可能对留守者造成的影响——而不是整个人类的丧失。

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.

换句话说，我们倾向于认为没有斑马的世界比大多数斑马死亡的世界更悲惨。但对于人类来说，大多数人的想法恰恰相反。

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."

有一种方法让调查者把我们整个物种的损失视为一种极不好的结果：尽管如此，研究人员只需告诉他们，人类将错过一个长期存在的“比任何时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.

虽然我们似乎无法阻止小行星撞击或火山爆发，但人类确实有权决定我们是否会成为核战争等的牺牲品，并且知道如果人们对我们的未来感到乐观，他们更可能关心我们物种的潜在衰亡，从而确保我们不要走那种自我毁灭的道路。

"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."

调查报告的合著者斯特凡·舒伯特(Stefan Schubert)最近在接受美国之音采访时说：“人们将对我们将要做的(关于人类近期灭绝威胁的)事情产生很大影响。”因此，了解人们对他们的看法很重要。”