What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

In some ways, it’s no surprise that Liu was invited to see the dish. He has an outsize voice on cosmic affairs in China, and the government’s aerospace agency sometimes asks him to consult on science missions. Liu is the patriarch of the country’s science-fiction scene. Other Chinese writers I met attached the honorific Da, meaning “Big,” to his surname. In years past, the academy’s engineers sent Liu illustrated updates on the dish’s construction, along with notes saying how he’d inspired their work.

在某些方面，刘慈欣被邀请去参观望远镜并不令人吃惊。他在中国太空事务上被捧得很高，政府航天机构有时会就科学任务向他咨询。刘是中国科幻界的大拿，我遇到的其他中国作家尊称他“大刘”。过去几年，中科院的工程师将望远镜建设的进展以绘图方式发给刘慈欣，指出他为这项工作提供了灵感。

But in other ways Liu is a strange choice to visit the dish. He has written a great deal about the risks of first contact. He has warned that the “appearance of this Other” might be imminent, and that it might result in our extinction. “Perhaps in ten thousand years, the starry sky that humankind gazes upon will remain empty and silent,” he writes in the postscript to one of his books. “But perhaps tomorrow we’ll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit.”

但在另外一些方面，让刘慈欣参观望远镜又是个怪异的选择。他写了不少关于第一类接触的诸多危险。他警告“他者出现”可能近在眼前，这可能导致人类灭绝。“可能在未来一万年中，人类仰望的星空依然空洞、寂静，”他在小说的后记中写道。“但或许我们明天醒来，就会发现和月亮一样大的外星飞船停在轨道上了。”

In recent years, Liu has joined the ranks of the global literati. In 2015, his novel The Three-Body Problem became the first work in translation to win the Hugo Award, science fiction’s most prestigious prize. Barack Obama told The New York Times that the book—the first in a trilogy—gave him cosmic perspective during the frenzy of his presidency. Liu told me that Obama’s staff asked him for an advance copy of the third volume.

近年来，刘慈欣扬名全球文坛。2015年，小说《三体》成为第一个获得雨果奖的翻译作品。雨果奖是科幻小说界最负盛名的奖项。贝拉克·奥巴马对《纽约时报》说，三部曲中的第一部让他在纷乱总统生涯中获得了宇宙视角。刘慈欣告诉我，奥巴马的幕僚向他索要第三部的预发稿影印件。

At the end of the second volume, one of the main characters lays out the trilogy’s animating philosophy. No civilization should ever announce its presence to the cosmos, he says. Any other civilization that learns of its existence will perceive it as a threat to expand—as all civilizations do, eliminating their competitors until they encounter one with superior technology and are themselves eliminated. This grim cosmic outlook is called “dark-forest theory,” because it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of a rival.

第二部结束时，一名主角说出这一三部曲作品中启迪人心的哲学：没有哪个文明应该向宇宙宣布其存在。任何获知其存在的其他文明都会将其视作打算扩张的威胁，所有文明都会铲除竞争者，直到遇到技术更优越的一个，结果自己被铲除。这种黑暗的宇宙观被称作“黑暗森林理论”，因为它将宇宙中每一种文明视作藏在没有月色的树林中的猎手，侦听着对手的第一响窸窣。

Liu’s trilogy begins in the late 1960s, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when a young Chinese woman sends a message to a nearby star system. The civilization that receives it embarks on a centuries-long mission to invade Earth, but she doesn’t care; the Red Guard’s grisly excesses have convinced her that humans no longer deserve to survive. En route to our planet, the extraterrestrial civilization disrupts our particle accelerators to prevent us from making advancements in the physics of warfare, such as the one that brought the atomic bomb into being less than a century after the invention of the repeating rifle.

刘慈欣的三部曲开始于文化大革命发生的六十年代末，当时一位年轻的中国女人向附近的星系发了一条消息，于是收到信息的文明开始了长达数个世纪之久的征程，意在征服地球，但她不在意，红卫兵胡作非为，让她相信人类不配再繁衍下去了。在前往我们星球的途中，地外文明破坏我们的粒子加速器，以防我们在物理领域取得进展并增强战力，毕竟在机关枪发明不到一个世纪后，人类就发明了原子弹。

Science fiction is sometimes described as a literature of the future, but historical allegory is one of its dominant modes. Isaac Asimov based his Foundation series on classical Rome, and Frank Herbert’s Dune borrows plot points from the past of the Bedouin Arabs. 

科幻小说有时被描述成关于未来的文学，但隐喻历史是其主要模式之一。伊萨克·阿西莫夫的《基地》系列设定发生在古罗马，弗兰克·赫伯特的《沙丘》借用了贝都因阿拉伯人的故事。

Liu is reluctant to make connections between his books and the real world, but he did tell me that his work is influenced by the history of Earth’s civilizations, “especially the encounters between more technologically advanced civilizations and the original settlers of a place.” One such encounter occurred during the 19th century, when the “Middle Kingdom” of China, around which all of Asia had once revolved, looked out to sea and saw the ships of Europe’s seafaring empires, whose ensuing invasion triggered a loss in status for China comparable to the fall of Rome.

刘慈欣不愿将作品和真实世界联系起来，“尤其是一种技术更先进文明与某地原住民的接触”。这种接触就发生在19世纪，当时的“中央王国”——曾接纳全亚洲的朝贡——睁眼看世界，看到了欧洲海上帝国的舰船，接下来的入侵让中国地位中落，堪比罗马覆灭。

This past summer, I traveled to China to visit its new observatory, but first I met up with Liu in Beijing. By way of small talk, I asked him about the film adaptation of The Three-Body Problem. “People here want it to be China’s Star Wars,” he said, looking pained. The pricey shoot ended in mid-2015, but the film is still in postproduction. At one point, the entire special-effects team was replaced. “When it comes to making science-fiction movies, our system is not mature,” Liu said.

去年夏天，我去中国参观这个新天文台，但在北京先邂逅了刘慈欣。我们简单寒暄了几句，我问到他《三体》的电影改编。“这里的人希望那是一部中国版《星球大战》，”他说，看起来很受伤。电影制作成本不菲，并在2015年中杀青，但现在影片仍在后期制作之中，其间整个特技团队都被更换了。“制作科幻电影，我们的体系还不成熟。”刘慈欣说。

I had come to interview Liu in his capacity as China’s foremost philosopher of first contact, but I also wanted to know what to expect when I visited the new dish. After a translator relayed my question, Liu stopped smoking and smiled. “It looks like something out of science fiction,” he said.

我采访了刘慈欣，原因是他是中国头号研究第一类接触的哲学家，我也想知道他看到新望远镜作何观想。翻译传递了我的问题，刘慈欣停下来抽烟，一脸笑容。“看起来不怎么科幻。”

A week later, I rode a bullet train out of Shanghai, leaving behind its purple Blade Runner glow, its hip cafés and craft-beer bars. Rocketing along an elevated track, I watched high-rises blur by, each a tiny honeycomb piece of the rail-linked urban megastructure that has recently erupted out of China’s landscape. China poured more concrete from 2011 to 2013 than America did during the entire 20th century. The country has already built rail lines in Africa, and it hopes to fire bullet trains into Europe and North America, the latter by way of a tunnel under the Bering Sea.

一周后，我从上海坐高铁出发，把《银翼杀手》影片中那种灯红酒绿、雅致的咖啡馆和精酿啤酒吧甩在身后。在高架桥铁轨上风驰电掣，我看着高楼大厦向后闪退，这些都是最近几年在中国平地拔起的巨型建筑，它们因铁路而生。中国2011年到2013年使用的水泥和美国在整个20世纪一样多。中国已经在非洲修建铁路，并希望将高铁打入欧洲和北美，通过在白令海峡打一条隧道进入北美。

The skyscrapers and cranes dwindled as the train moved farther inland. Out in the emerald rice fields, among the low-hanging mists, it was easy to imagine ancient China—the China whose written language was adopted across much of Asia; the China that introduced metal coins, paper money, and gunpowder into human life; the China that built the river-taming system that still irrigates the country’s terraced hills. 

随着火车开进内陆，摩天大厦和塔吊锐减。在雾蒙蒙、碧绿色的稻米地中，很容易想象到古老的中国，那个文字被亚洲许多地区采用的中国，那个把铸币、纸币和火药带入人类生活的中国，那个建造的水利系统仍在灌溉梯田的中国。

Those hills grew steeper as we went west, stair-stepping higher and higher, until I had to lean up against the window to see their peaks. Every so often, a Hans Zimmer bass note would sound, and the glass pane would fill up with the smooth, spaceship-white side of another train, whooshing by in the opposite direction at almost 200 miles an hour.

我们一路西行，山逐渐陡峭，火车越攀越高，后来我只有靠在窗口旁才能看得到山峰。每隔一会儿，汉斯·季默惯用的低音音符就会响起，窗格里填满了另一辆列车太空白色的躯干，两车平滑地会车，另外一辆列车以每小时近200英里的速度从反方向呼啸而过。

It was mid-afternoon when we glided into a sparkling, cavernous terminal in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou, one of China’s poorest, most remote provinces. A government-imposed social transformation appeared to be under way. Signs implored people not to spit indoors. Loudspeakers nagged passengers to “keep an atmosphere of good manners.” When an older man cut in the cab line, a security guard dressed him down in front of a crowd of hundreds.

正值下午时分，我们缓缓驶入崭新巨大的站台，贵州省会贵阳站，这里是中国最贫困、最边远的省份之一。政府推动的社会转型正如火如荼地进行。标语恳请人们不要在室内吐痰，喇叭里反复让行人“讲礼貌”，一个年纪不小的男子打车时插队，一个保安当着几百号人训斥他。

The next morning, I went down to my hotel lobby to meet the driver I’d hired to take me to the observatory. Two hours into what was supposed to be a four-hour drive, he pulled over in the rain and waded 30 yards into a field where an older woman was harvesting rice, to ask for directions to a radio observatory more than 100 miles away. After much frustrated gesturing by both parties, she pointed the way with her scythe.

第二天早上，我下到酒店大厅，找到约好的司机，他送我去天文台。行程估计四小时，开了两个小时后，司机冒着雨，涉水走进30码的田里，向一位正在收割稻子的老妇人打听去射电天文台的路，天文台距离这里还有100多英里。两人一通比划后，她用镰刀指出方向。

We set off again, making our way through a string of small villages, beep-beeping motorbike riders and pedestrians out of our way. Some of the buildings along the road were centuries old, with upturned eaves; others were freshly built, their residents having been relocated by the state to clear ground for the new observatory. A group of the displaced villagers had complained about their new housing, attracting bad press—a rarity for a government project in China. Western reporters took notice. “China Telescope to Displace 9,000 Villagers in Hunt for Extraterrestrials,” read a headline in The New York Times.

我们再次启程，穿过几个小村庄，骑摩托车的突突而过，不时还有行人。路旁有些带飞檐的建筑有几百年历史，其他就是新建的了，国家为建天文台移迁过来一些居民。部分移民对新居有些抱怨，这引来了唱黑的媒体，在中国，对这一政府项目说风凉话的不多，西方记者却挑出毛病来了。“中国望远镜要搬迁9000村民以寻找地外生命，”《纽约时报》头条这么写。

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (seti) is often derided as a kind of religious mysticism, even within the scientific community. Nearly a quarter century ago, the United States Congress defunded America’s seti program with a budget amendment proposed by Senator Richard Bryan of Nevada, who said he hoped it would “be the end of Martian-hunting season at the taxpayer’s expense.” That’s one reason it is China, and not the United States, that has built the first world-class radio observatory with seti as a core scientific goal.

寻找地外生命经常被嘲笑为一种宗教神秘主义，甚至在科学界都如此。大概二十五年前，美国国会的内华达州参议员理查德·布莱恩提出预算修正案，停止向美国寻找地外生命项目提供资金，他希望“用纳税人的钱寻找火星人，这事该歇歇了”。这也是为什么在中国而非美国，建造了世界一流的射电天文台，而其核心科学目标就是寻找地外生命。

Seti does share some traits with religion. It is motivated by deep human desires for connection and transcendence. It concerns itself with questions about human origins, about the raw creative power of nature, and about our future in this universe—and it does all this at a time when traditional religions have become unpersuasive to many. Why these aspects of seti should count against it is unclear. Nor is it clear why Congress should find seti unworthy of funding, given that the government has previously been happy to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on ambitious searches for phenomena whose existence was still in question. 

寻找地外生命确实有点像宗教。它源自人类渴望接触和超越的欲望，处理人类起源、自然原初力、这个宇宙的未来等问题，这在传统诸宗教难以令人信服之际得以兴起。为什么这些方面带来不利影响尚不清楚，也不清楚国会为什么就认为寻找地外生命不值得投资，毕竟政府此前乐意花数亿税金，雄心勃勃地寻找连是否存在都成疑的现象。

The expensive, decades-long missions that found black holes and gravitational waves both commenced when their targets were mere speculative possibilities. That intelligent life can evolve on a planet is not a speculative possibility, as Darwin demonstrated. Indeed, seti might be the most intriguing scientific project suggested by Darwinism.

昂贵且长达数十年的寻找黑洞和引力波的任务在这些目标还只是猜测时就开始了。智慧生命可能在某颗星星上生存着并非一种猜测，正如达尔文所证明。事实上，寻找地外文明可能是达尔文主义导致的最有趣的工程。

Even without federal funding in the United States, seti is now in the midst of a global renaissance. Today’s telescopes have brought the distant stars nearer, and in their orbits we can see planets. The next generation of observatories is now clicking on, and with them we will zoom into these planets’ atmospheres. seti researchers have been preparing for this moment. In their exile, they have become philosophers of the future. They have tried to imagine what technologies an advanced civilization might use, and what imprints those technologies would make on the observable universe. They have figured out how to spot the chemical traces of artificial pollutants from afar. They know how to scan dense star fields for giant structures designed to shield planets from a supernova’s shock waves.

即便美国停拨了联邦资金，寻找地外文明正在经历一场全球性复兴。今天的望远镜将遥远的恒星拉近了，我们可以看到这些恒星的行星。下一代天文台呼之欲出，有了它们，我们可以看到这些行星的大气，地外文明研究者正等着这一刻来临。他们试图想象先进文明可能会使用什么技术，这些技术会在可观测的宇宙中留下什么痕迹。他们设想出如何发现遥远的人造污染物留下的化学痕迹。他们知道如何扫描星空，寻找设计用来保护行星免遭超新星冲击波毁灭的大型构造。

In 2015, the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner poured $100 million of his own cash into a new seti program led by scientists at UC Berkeley. The team performs more seti observations in a single day than took place during entire years just a decade ago. In 2016, Milner sank another $100 million into an interstellar-probe mission. A beam from a giant laser array, to be built in the Chilean high desert, will wallop dozens of wafer-thin probes more than four light-years to the Alpha Centauri system, to get a closer look at its planets. Milner told me the probes’ cameras might be able to make out individual continents. 

2015年，俄国百万富翁尤里·米尔纳自掏1亿美元现金，资助加州大学伯克利分校领导的新寻找项目。团队一天内进行的搜寻比十年前整年的都要多。2016年，米尔纳又给一个星际探测任务投了1亿美元。一个将在智利大沙漠中建造的大型激光阵列将发射激光，光束将会推动多个超薄探测器前往四光年外的阿尔法半人马座，仔细观察阿尔法半人马座的行星。米尔纳告诉我，探测器的摄像头可能能分辨出行星上的每一块大陆。

The Alpha Centauri team modeled the radiation that such a beam would send out into space, and noticed striking similarities to the mysterious “fast radio bursts” that Earth’s astronomers keep detecting, which suggests the possibility that they are caused by similar giant beams, powering similar probes elsewhere in the cosmos.

半人马座团队注意到，进入空间的光束与地球上的天文学家一直侦测到的神秘“快速射电爆”有惊人相似之处，这表明它们可能是由类似的巨型激光阵列发出的，或许正是其他星系在探索宇宙中的其他地方。

Andrew Siemion, the leader of Milner’s seti team, is actively looking into this possibility. He visited the Chinese dish while it was still under construction, to lay the groundwork for joint observations and to help welcome the Chinese team into a growing network of radio observatories that will cooperate on seti research, including new facilities in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. 

米尔纳研究团队负责人安德鲁·西米恩正积极探索地外文明的可能性。在中国巨型射电望远镜尚未建成时，西米恩就前往参观，为国际间联合观测打下基础并热烈欢迎中国加入无线电观测网，各观测点将在寻找地外文明方面进行合作，其设施遍布澳大利亚，新西兰以及南非等地。

When I joined Siemion for overnight seti observations at a radio observatory in West Virginia last fall, he gushed about the Chinese dish. He said it was the world’s most sensitive telescope in the part of the radio spectrum that is “classically considered to be the most probable place for an extraterrestrial transmitter.”

去年秋天，我在西弗吉尼亚州的一个射电天文台，同西米恩一起在夜里寻找地外文明，中国的射电望远镜让他格外兴奋。他说，就波段而言，那是世界上最灵敏的望远镜，可以探测到那些“经常被认为最有可能是外星发射器发出的无线电频谱”。

Before I left for China, Siemion warned me that the roads around the observatory were difficult to navigate, but he said I’d know I was close when my phone reception went wobbly. Radio transmissions are forbidden near the dish, lest scientists there mistake stray electromagnetic radiation for a signal from the deep. Supercomputers are still sifting through billions of false positives collected during previous setiobservations, most caused by human technological interference.

来中国前，西米恩告诉我天文台周围的道路很难找，但他说我的手机失去信号时，就离目的地不远了。在抛物面附近禁止任何无线电传输，以免科学家们错误地将电磁干扰当成是宇宙深空中发射而来的信息。即便如此，天文台的超级计算机仍会收到数十亿个误报，其中大部分是人为干扰造成的。

My driver was on the verge of turning back when my phone reception finally began to wane. The sky had darkened in the five hours since we’d left sunny Guiyang. High winds were whipping between the Avatar-style mountains, making the long bamboo stalks sway like giant green feathers. A downpour of fat droplets began splattering the windshield just as I lost service for good.

我的司机都准备打道回府了，我的手机信号终于开始减弱。离开阳光灿烂的贵阳已经五个小时了，天色暗了下来。强风在阿凡达式的群山中呼啸，颀长的竹茎如巨大的绿色羽毛般摇摆。大雨点子开始拍在挡风玻璃上，这时我的手机终于彻底没了信号。

The week before, Liu and I had visited a stargazing site of a much older vintage. In 1442, after the Ming dynasty moved China’s capital to Beijing, the emperor broke ground on a new observatory near the Forbidden City. More than 40 feet high, the elegant, castlelike structure came to house China’s most precious astronomical instruments.

一周前，刘慈欣和我参观了一个更加古老的观星台。1442年，明朝迁都北京后，皇帝在紫禁城旁破土兴建了一个新的天文台。这个典雅、城堡般的建筑有40英尺高，里面有中国最昂贵的天文仪器。

No civilization on Earth has a longer continuous tradition of astronomy than China, whose earliest emperors drew their political legitimacy from the sky, in the form of a “mandate of heaven.” More than 3,500 years ago, China’s court astronomers pressed pictograms of cosmic events into tortoiseshells and ox bones. One of these “oracle bones” bears the earliest known record of a solar eclipse. It was likely interpreted as an omen of catastrophe, perhaps an ensuing invasion.

地球上没有哪个文明的天文学传统延续了中国这么久，中国最早期的皇帝自称从上天获得政治合法性，是谓“天命”。3500多年前，中国宫廷天文学家把天文事件的象形图刻在乌龟壳和牛骨上。其中一片“甲骨”记载了已知最早的日食。那可能被解读为灾难的预兆，可能要发动一场侵略战争。

Liu and I sat at a black-marble table in the old observatory’s stone courtyard. Centuries-old pines towered overhead, blocking the hazy sunlight that poured down through Beijing’s yellow, polluted sky. Through a round, red portal at the courtyard’s edge, a staircase led up to a turretlike observation platform, where a line of ancient astronomical devices stood, including a giant celestial globe supported by slithering bronze dragons. The starry globe was stolen in 1900, after an eight-country alliance stormed Beijing to put down the Boxer Rebellion. Troops from Germany and France flooded into the courtyard where Liu and I were sitting, and made off with 10 of the observatory’s prized instruments.

刘慈欣和我坐在古天文台石头院子里的黑色大理石桌旁。数百年的松树高耸如云，遮挡了北京污黄色天空中的昏暗阳光。在院子一边是圆形的红色大门，一道楼梯通向一个类似炮塔的观天台，其上包括一个巨大的天球，由数条青铜铸成的龙撑着。 1900年，八国联军进北京时把这个刻有星星的圆球盗走了，当时德、法两国军队挤在刘慈欣和我坐着的院子里，搬走了数十台珍贵的天文仪器。

The instruments were eventually returned, but the sting of the incident lingered. Chinese schoolchildren are still taught to think of this general period as the “century of humiliation,” the nadir of China’s long fall from its Ming-dynasty peak. Back when the ancient observatory was built, China could rightly regard itself as the lone survivor of the great Bronze Age civilizations, a class that included the Babylonians, the Mycenaeans, and even the ancient Egyptians. Western poets came to regard the latter’s ruins as Ozymandian proof that nothing lasted. But China had lasted. Its emperors presided over the planet’s largest complex social organization. They commanded tribute payments from China’s neighbors, whose rulers sent envoys to Beijing to perform a baroque face-to-the-ground bowing ceremony for the emperors’ pleasure.

最终仪器还是还了回来，但这一事件依旧刺痛着中国人。中国学校的孩子仍然要记住那一段被叫做“百年屈辱”的时期，当时中国从明代的巅峰一直跌到谷底。回到古天文台建造之时，中国可以自视为伟大的青铜时代文明的孤独幸存者，巴比伦人、迈锡尼人，甚至连古埃及人都未得善终。西方的诗人认为后者的遗迹就是铁证，说明没什么能亘古不变，可中国就坚持下来了。中国的皇帝统治着行星上最复杂的社会组织。他们命令中国的邻居朝贡，这些统治者派遣使团到北京来，表演巴洛克式的俯首叩头，取悦皇帝。

In the first volume of his landmark series, Science and Civilisation in China, published in 1954, the British Sinologist Joseph Needham asked why the scientific revolution hadn’t happened in China, given its sophisticated intellectual meritocracy, based on exams that measured citizens’ mastery of classical texts. This inquiry has since become known as the “Needham Question,” though Voltaire too had wondered why Chinese mathematics stalled out at geometry, and why it was the Jesuits who brought the gospel of Copernicus into China, and not the other way around. 

英国汉学家李约瑟在1954年出版的巨作《科学与文明》的第一卷中提问，有经验丰富的知识分子官员，他们通过考试，熟练掌握经典文本，但科学革命为何没有在中国发生呢？后来这个问题成为了“李约瑟之问”，尽管伏尔泰也奇怪为什么中国数学只停留在几何学，为什么是耶稣会教士把哥白尼的真理带到中国，而非相反。

He blamed the Confucian emphasis on tradition. Other historians blamed China’s remarkably stable politics. A large landmass ruled by long dynasties may have encouraged less technical dynamism than did Europe, where more than 10 polities were crammed into a small area, triggering constant conflict. As we know from the Manhattan Project, the stakes of war have a way of sharpening the scientific mind.

他认为中国儒家过于强调传统。也有历史学家怪中国政治太稳固。历代王朝统治的这块大陆可能不像欧洲那样鼓励技术进步，在欧洲，十多个政体挤在一小块地方，让那里争斗不断。正如曼哈顿工程所示，战争促使人发展科技。

Still others have accused premodern China of insufficient curiosity about life beyond its borders. (Notably, there seems to have been very little speculation in China about extraterrestrial life before the modern era.) This lack of curiosity is said to explain why China pressed pause on naval innovation during the late Middle Ages, right at the dawn of Europe’s age of exploration, when the Western imperial powers were looking fondly back through the medieval fog to seafaring Athens.

还有人指责前现代化的中国好奇心不足，不想知道外面的世界。（值得注意，看起来现代以前中国罕有人猜想到地外生命。）这种好奇心的缺乏，据说解释了中国在中世纪末期何以按下暂停键，不再探索海洋，可当时正值欧洲大航海时代的前夕，西方列强兴致勃勃地穿过中世纪的迷雾，向往着活跃在海洋上的雅典。

Whatever the reason, China paid a dear price for slipping behind the West in science and technology. In 1793, King George III stocked a ship with the British empire’s most dazzling inventions and sent it to China, only to be rebuffed by its emperor, who said he had “no use” for England’s trinkets. Nearly half a century later, Britain returned to China, seeking buyers for India’s opium harvest. China’s emperor again declined, and instead cracked down on the local sale of the drug, culminating in the seizure and flamboyant seaside destruction of 2 million pounds of British-owned opium.

不管什么原因，中国在科学技术上落后西方，并为此付出沉重代价。1793年，英王乔治三世把英帝国最了不起的发明送到中国，却遭到皇帝的拒绝，他说这些都是英格兰的奇技淫巧，没有用处。不到半个世纪后，英国回到中国，为印度的鸦片寻找买家。中国皇帝再次拒绝了，取缔销售鸦片，最后查禁并公然在海边烧毁了属于英国的价值200万英镑的鸦片。

Her Majesty’s Navy responded with the full force of its futuristic technology, running ironclad steamships straight up the Yangtze, sinking Chinese junk boats, until the emperor had no choice but to sign the first of the “unequal treaties” that ceded Hong Kong, along with five other ports, to British jurisdiction. After the French made a colony of Vietnam, they joined in this “slicing of the Chinese melon,” as it came to be called, along with the Germans, who occupied a significant portion of Shandong province.

女王陛下的海军用未来主义的技术加以回击，把铁甲蒸汽船径直开进长江，击沉了中国不堪一击的船只，最后皇帝别无选择，签订了第一个“不平等条约”，割让了香港及五个港口归英国管辖。法国在越南建立殖民地后，英国人开始“切割中国”，还有德国人，他们在山东省占了一块地。

Meanwhile Japan, a “little brother” as far as China was concerned, responded to Western aggression by quickly modernizing its navy, such that in 1894, it was able to sink most of China’s fleet in a single battle, taking Taiwan as the spoils. And this was just a prelude to Japan’s brutal mid-20th-century invasion of China, part of a larger campaign of civilizational expansion that aimed to spread Japanese power to the entire Pacific, a campaign that was largely successful, until it encountered the United States and its city-leveling nukes.

同时期，中国的“小兄弟”日本面对西方入侵，选择迅速将海军现代化，在1894年，日本能在一次战斗中击沉中国大多数船只，并将台湾纳为己有。这只是日本在二十世纪中叶侵略中国的前奏，后者是岛国文明大扩张的一部分，旨在将日本实力投射到全亚洲，这基本获得了成功，直到它遇到美国和夷平了城市的核导弹。

China’s humiliations multiplied with America’s rise. After sending 200,000 laborers to the Western Front in support of the Allied war effort during World War I, Chinese diplomats arrived at Versailles expecting something of a restoration, or at least relief from the unequal treaties. Instead, China was seated at the kids’ table with Greece and Siam, while the Western powers carved up the globe.

美国崛起让中国人倍受屈辱。第一次世界大战期间，中国派遣20万名劳工到西线支援盟军作战。战后，中国外交官抵达凡尔赛，期望中国至少能从不平等的条约中解脱出来。但结果事与愿违，中国仅能与希腊、暹罗等小国平起平坐，眼睁睁看西方列强划分全球利益。

Only recently has China regained its geopolitical might, after opening to the world during Deng Xiaoping’s 1980s reign. Deng evinced a near-religious reverence for science and technology, a sentiment that is undimmed in Chinese culture today. The country is on pace to outspend the United States on R&D this decade, but the quality of its research varies a great deal. According to one study, even at China’s most prestigious academic institutions, a third of scientific papers are faked or plagiarized. Knowing how poorly the country’s journals are regarded, Chinese universities are reportedly offering bonuses of up to six figures to researchers who publish in Western journals.

直到最近，邓小平向开放后，中国才重获其地缘政治实力。邓小平对科学技术表达了近乎宗教般的敬意，在中国当今文化中这种情感仍然显而易见。这一个十年中，中国在科研支出上正赶超美国，但研究的质量却参差不齐。一项研究表明，即便中国最著名的学术机构中，也有三分之一的论文是伪造或剽窃的。明白本国的期刊多么不受尊重，中国大学据说对在西方期刊上发表论文的研究者给予六位数的奖励。

It remains an open question whether Chinese science will ever catch up with that of the West without a bedrock political commitment to the free exchange of ideas. China’s persecution of dissident scientists began under Mao, whose ideologues branded Einstein’s theories “counterrevolutionary.” But it did not end with him. Even in the absence of overt persecution, the country’s “great firewall” handicaps Chinese scientists, who have difficulty accessing data published abroad.

不打开言路，中国科学能否赶上西方仍是一个众说纷纭的问题。文革时代，爱因斯坦的理论被说成“反革命”。但不止于此，虽然没有公开的迫害，但中国科学家还是受到网络限制，很难接触到国外发表的数据。

China has learned the hard way that spectacular scientific achievements confer prestige upon nations. The “Celestial Kingdom” looked on from the sidelines as Russia flung the first satellite and human being into space, and then again when American astronauts spiked the Stars and Stripes into the lunar crust.

中国已经明白出色的科学成就给民族带来的荣耀。俄国人把第一个人造卫星和第一个人送上太空时，“天国”只能在一旁干看着，美国宇航员把星条旗插在月壤上时也是这样。

China has largely focused on the applied sciences. It built the world’s fastest supercomputer, spent heavily on medical research, and planted a “great green wall” of forests in its northwest as a last-ditch effort to halt the Gobi Desert’s spread. 

但中国更多看重应用科学。中国建造了世界上最快的超级计算机，主要用于医学研究；中国在西北部植树，建造了一条绿色长城抵御了荒漠的蔓延。

Now China is bringing its immense resources to bear on the fundamental sciences. The country plans to build an atom smasher that will conjure thousands of “god particles” out of the ether, in the same time it took cern’s Large Hadron Collider to strain out a handful. It is also eyeing Mars. In the technopoetic idiom of the 21st century, nothing would symbolize China’s rise like a high-definition shot of a Chinese astronaut setting foot on the red planet. Nothing except, perhaps, first contact.

现在中国正在把大量资源用于基础科学研究。中国计划建造原子对撞机，凭空召唤数以千计的“上帝粒子”，而欧洲核子中心的大型强子对撞机只能弄出几个来。中国还瞄上了火星。用21世纪技术界一句颇有诗意的格言说，没有什么比中国宇航员踏足红色星球的高清照片更能象征中国崛起了，除第一类接触之外。

At a security station 10 miles from the dish, I handed my cellphone to a guard. He locked it away in a secure compartment and escorted me to a pair of metal detectors so I could demonstrate that I wasn’t carrying any other electronics. A different guard drove me on a narrow access road to a switchback-laden stairway that climbed 800 steps up a mountainside, through buzzing clouds of blue dragonflies, to a platform overlooking the observatory.

在距离天文台10英里外的安检站，我把手机交给一个守卫。他把手机锁在一个安全箱里并护送我过了两道安检，证明我没有携带其他电子设备。另一个守卫开车沿一条窄路把我送到之形台阶下，爬了800级才到山顶，穿过一片嗡嗡作响的蓝色蜻蜓，来到俯瞰整个天文台的平台上。

Until a few months before his death this past September, the radio astronomer Nan Rendong was the observatory’s scientific leader, and its soul. It was Nan who had made sure the new dish was customized to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He’d been with the project since its inception, in the early 1990s, when he used satellite imagery to pick out hundreds of candidate sites among the deep depressions in China’s Karst mountain region.

去年九月去世前几个月，射电天文学家南仁东还是天文台的科学主管，也是天文台的灵魂。正是南仁东保证了新的望远镜用来寻找地外文明。他一开始就参与了这个项目，那是九十年代初，当时他利用卫星图像，在中国喀斯特地区的洼地中挑选了数百个候选地点。

Apart from microwaves, such as those that make up the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, radio waves are the weakest form of electromagnetic radiation. The collective energy of all the radio waves caught by Earth’s observatories in a year is less than the kinetic energy released when a single snowflake comes softly to rest on bare soil. Collecting these ethereal signals requires technological silence. 

除微波辐射外，即大爆炸留下的微弱余晖，无线电波是电磁辐射的最弱形式。地球上的天文台一年捕获的无线电波能量不足一片雪轻轻落在土上的动能。捕获这些飘忽的信号需要在技术上实现静默。

That’s why China plans to one day put a radio observatory on the dark side of the moon, a place more technologically silent than anywhere on Earth. It’s why, over the course of the past century, radio observatories have sprouted, like cool white mushrooms, in the blank spots between this planet’s glittering cities. And it’s why Nan went looking for a dish site in the remote Karst mountains. Tall, jagged, and covered in subtropical vegetation, these limestone mountains rise up abruptly from the planet’s crust, forming barriers that can protect an observatory’s sensitive ear from wind and radio noise.

这就是为什么中国计划未来将射电天文台建在月亮背面，这里比地球上任何地方都更为静默。这就是为什么，在过去一个世纪中，射电天文台如雨后春笋般地避开这个星球灯光闪烁的城市，出现在空白之处。这也是为什么南仁东在偏远的喀斯特山区为望远镜找到了安身之所。这些石灰岩山体从地壳上拔地而起，高耸、崎岖、覆盖着亚热带植被，它们成为道道屏障，保护了天文台敏感的耳朵不受风噪和电波噪音影响。

After making a shortlist of candidate locations, Nan set out to inspect them on foot. Hiking into the center of the Dawodang depression, he found himself at the bottom of a roughly symmetrical bowl, guarded by a nearly perfect ring of green mountains, all formed by the blind processes of upheaval and erosion. More than 20 years and $180 million later, Nan positioned the dish for its inaugural observation—its “first light,” in the parlance of astronomy. He pointed it at the fading radio glow of a supernova, or “guest star,” as Chinese astronomers had called it when they recorded the unusual brightness of its initial explosion almost 1,000 years earlier.

挑选了多处候选点，南仁东着手实地踏勘。他爬上大窝凼洼地，发现自己处于几乎对称的碗口中央，近乎完美地被一圈青山环绕，这皆由隆起和腐蚀天造而成。二十多年后，斥资1.8亿美元，南仁东启动了这个大抛物面，用天文学的语言说，这是“第一缕光”。他发现了超新星爆炸后的残光，超新星也叫“客星”，中国天文学家近一千年之前就记录了“客星”刚爆炸时产生的不同寻常的光亮。

After the dish is calibrated, it will start scanning large sections of the sky. Andrew Siemion’s seti team is working with the Chinese to develop an instrument to piggyback on these wide sweeps, which by themselves will constitute a radical expansion of the human search for the cosmic other. Siemion told me he’s especially excited to survey dense star fields at the center of the galaxy. “It’s a very interesting place for an advanced civilization to situate itself,” he said. The sheer number of stars and the presence of a supermassive black hole make for ideal conditions “if you want to slingshot a bunch of probes around the galaxy.” Siemion’s receiver will train its sensitive algorithms on billions of wavelengths, across billions of stars, looking for a beacon.

望远镜校准后，就开始扫描星空了。安德鲁·西米昂的寻找地外文明团队正在中国人一起开发一台设备处理大量的观测结果，这本身就是人类寻找外星生命的巨大进步。西米昂告诉我，扫描星系中央密布的星团让他特别激动。“这是先进文明栖息的地方，很有意思，”他说。“如果你想向星系弹射一波探测器”，仅那里恒星的数量和超大黑洞的存在就创造了理想的条件。西米昂的接收器会针对数十亿恒星的数十亿波长改进其敏感的算法，寻找信号。

Liu Cixin told me he doubts the dish will find one. In a dark-forest cosmos like the one he imagines, no civilization would ever send a beacon unless it were a “death monument,” a powerful broadcast announcing the sender’s impending extinction. If a civilization were about to be invaded by another, or incinerated by a gamma-ray burst, or killed off by some other natural cause, it might use the last of its energy reserves to beam out a dying cry to the most life-friendly planets in its vicinity.

刘慈欣告诉我，他换衣望远镜能否找到地外文明。在他设想的黑暗森林中，没有文明会发出一束信号，除非那是一个“死亡信号”，强有力地宣告发送者即将被灭种。如果一个文明将被入侵，将被伽马射线暴烧干净，或被其他自然原因干掉，才会使用最后一点能量发射出死亡的呼号，向最近的宜居行星求救。

Even if Liu is right, and the Chinese dish has no hope of detecting a beacon, it is still sensitive enough to hear a civilization’s fainter radio whispers, the ones that aren’t meant to be overheard, like the aircraft-radar waves that constantly waft off Earth’s surface. If civilizations are indeed silent hunters, we might be wise to hone in on this “leakage” radiation. Many of the night sky’s stars might be surrounded by faint halos of leakage, each a fading artifact of a civilization’s first blush with radio technology, before it recognized the risk and turned off its detectable transmitters. Previous observatories could search only a handful of stars for this radiation. China’s dish has the sensitivity to search tens of thousands.

就算刘慈欣说得对，中国望远镜不可能发现信号，它却足够敏感，能听到文明发出的窸窣，这些文明无意被监听，就像飘在地球表面上的飞机雷达波。如果其他文明真的是静默的猎手，我们竖起耳朵聆听这种“泄露”的信号还是明智的。许多夜空中的恒星可能被这种泄露的微弱光晕围绕，那时某一文明最初掌握射电技术的遗迹，那时他们还没有因意识到风险而关闭可被监测到的发射器。以前的观测只能搜索到为数不多的恒星辐射。中国的望远镜很敏感，可以搜索到数万个。

In Beijing, I told Liu that I was holding out hope for a beacon. I told him I thought dark-forest theory was based on too narrow a reading of history. It may infer too much about the general behavior of civilizations from specific encounters between China and the West. Liu replied, convincingly, that China’s experience with the West is representative of larger patterns. Across history, it is easy to find examples of expansive civilizations that used advanced technologies to bully others. “In China’s imperial history, too,” he said, referring to the country’s long-standing domination of its neighbors.

在北京，我对刘慈欣说，我对收到外星人信号抱有希望。我告诉他，我认为黑暗森林理论是基于对一小段历史的解读，可能那是从中西方的特殊遭遇来推断文明间的一般行为。刘慈欣自信地回答说，中国和西方的经验代表着更大的模式。在历史上，不乏有扩张文明使用先进技术欺凌弱小的例子。“在中国的帝国历史中也是一样。”他指的是中国长期主导其邻国。

But even if these patterns extend back across all of recorded history, and even if they extend back to the murky epochs of prehistory, to when the Neanderthals vanished sometime after first contact with modern humans, that still might not tell us much about galactic civilizations. For a civilization that has learned to survive across cosmic timescales, humanity’s entire existence would be but a single moment in a long, bright dawn. And no civilization could last tens of millions of years without learning to live in peace internally. Human beings have already created weapons that put our entire species at risk; an advanced civilization’s weapons would likely far outstrip ours.

可就算这些套路可以追溯到有记载的历史之初，就算可以追溯到模糊不清的史前史，追溯到尼安德特人在和现代人第一类接触后遭到灭绝的历史，星系间文明究竟怎么回事还有很多未知。对于一个已经获知如何跨越宇宙尺度进行生存的文明而言，人类的整个存在史不过是漫长、明亮的清晨中的一个瞬间。没有哪个文明持续了数千万年还没有学会如何保持内心平和。人类已经创造出可以将整个种族置于危险之地的武器，一个先进文明的武器可能远胜于我们。

I told Liu that our civilization’s relative youth would suggest we’re an outlier on the spectrum of civilizational behavior, not a Platonic case to generalize from. The Milky Way has been habitable for billions of years. Anyone we make contact with will almost certainly be older, and perhaps wiser. Moreover, the night sky contains no evidence that older civilizations treat expansion as a first principle. Moreover, the night sky contains no evidence that older civilizations treat expansion as a first principle. 

我对刘慈欣说，我们的文明还很年轻，这说明我们在文明行为谱系中很边缘，并非可供总结经验的柏拉图式的范例。银河可以供生命居住长达数十亿年了，我们能接触到的任何人几乎肯定比我们更古老，可能也更聪明。更何况，茫茫夜空中，没有任何证据表明，更古老的文明将扩张视作第一准则。

Seti researchers have looked for civilizations that shoot outward in all directions from a single origin point, becoming an ever-growing sphere of technology, until they colonize entire galaxies. If they were consuming lots of energy, as expected, these civilizations would give off a telltale infrared glow, and yet we don’t see any in our all-sky scans. 

地外文明研究者已经在寻找从某个初始点各向发出信号的文明，他们信号的范围会越来越大，直到充斥整个星系。如果他们消耗了许多能量，就会留下红外光，可我们的全天搜索并未发现。

Maybe the self-replicating machinery required to spread rapidly across 100 billion stars would be doomed by runaway coding errors. Or maybe civilizations spread unevenly throughout a galaxy, just as humans have spread unevenly across the Earth. But even a civilization that captured a tenth of a galaxy’s stars would be easy to find, and we haven’t found a single one, despite having searched the nearest 100,000 galaxies.

或许这种自我重复的机器注定要出错，它们发出的信号要快速穿过1000亿颗恒星；又或许文明在星系中的分布并不均匀，正如人类在地球上的分布也不均匀一样。但即便只在星系中十分之一的恒星范围内散布了消息的文明也该很容易找到，可我们搜索了附近的10万个星系，结果还是没找到。

Some seti researchers have wondered about stealthier modes of expansion. They have looked into the feasibility of “Genesis probes,” spacecraft that can seed a planet with microbes, or accelerate evolution on its surface, by sparking a Cambrian explosion, like the one that juiced biological creativity on Earth. Some have even searched for evidence that such spacecraft might have visited this planet, by looking for encoded messages in our DNA—which is, after all, the most robust informational storage medium known to science. They too have come up empty. The idea that civilizations expand ever outward might be woefully anthropocentric.

有些地外文明研究者想知道是否存在更加隐秘的扩张模式。他们研究是否可能存在“创世探测器”，他们派飞船在一颗行星上放置微生物，或加速其在地表的演化，促发让地球生物喷涌而出的寒武纪生命大爆炸。有的甚至在寻找证据，认为可能有飞船造访过地球，寻找DNA密码，毕竟这是科学上已知的最出色的信息储备媒介。可他们都无所建树。文明会向外扩张，这种想法很不幸，都是人自己的想法。

Liu did not concede this point. To him, the absence of these signals is just further evidence that hunters are good at hiding. He told me that we are limited in how we think about other civilizations. “Especially those that may last millions or billions of years,” he said. “When we wonder why they don’t use certain technologies to spread across a galaxy, we might be like spiders wondering why humans don’t use webs to catch insects.” 

刘慈欣却不承认这一点。对他而言，没有找到信号正好进一步证明猎手善于隐藏。他对我说，我们对其他文明的认识很有限。“尤其那些可能生存了数百万或数十亿年的，”他说。“当我们想弄明白他们为什么不使用某些技术在星系中扩张时，我们可能就像蜘蛛那样，不知道人为什么人家不用网来捉虫子。”

And anyway, an older civilization that has achieved internal peace may still behave like a hunter, Liu said, in part because it would grasp the difficulty of “understanding one another across cosmic distances.” And it would know that the stakes of a misunderstanding could be existential.

不管怎么说，就算实现了内心平和的更古老的文明，可能依然是一个猎手，刘慈欣说，部分原因在于很难“在宇宙距离间达成相互理解”，而误解的代价可能事关生存。

First contact would be trickier still if we encountered a postbiological artificial intelligence that had taken control of its planet. Its worldview might be doubly alien. It might not feel empathy, which is not an essential feature of intelligence but instead an emotion installed by a particular evolutionary history and culture. The logic behind its actions could be beyond the powers of the human imagination. 

如果我们遇到一个已控制了星球的后生物人工智能文明，第一次接触会更为棘手。这种文明的世界观可能具备双重异质。它可能没法和你有所同感，移情并非智慧的本质特征，而是一种特定的历史进化和文化塑造的情感产物，人工智能文明行为背后的逻辑可能超出人类想象。

It might have transformed its entire planet into a supercomputer, and, according to a trio of Oxford researchers, it might find the current cosmos too warm for truly long-term, energy-efficient computing. It might cloak itself from observation, and power down into a dreamless sleep lasting hundreds of millions of years, until such time when the universe has expanded and cooled to a temperature that allows for many more epochs of computing.

它可能已经把整个星球变成了一台超级计算机，据牛津大学的三位研究人员说，这种智慧可能会发现当前宇宙过热，无法进行真正长期且节能的计算。它可能躲过了人类观测，进行着持续数亿年的休眠，直到宇宙膨胀并冷却到适合更多计算的温度。

As I came up the last flight of steps to the observation platform, the Earth itself seemed to hum like a supercomputer, thanks to the loud, whirring chirps of the mountains’ insects, all amplified by the dish’s acoustics. The first thing I noticed at the top was not the observatory, but the Karst mountains. They were all individuals, lumpen and oddly shaped. It was as though the Mayans had built giant pyramids across hundreds of square miles, and they’d all grown distinctive deformities as they were taken over by vegetation. They stretched in every direction, all the way to the horizon, the nearer ones dark green, and the distant ones looking like blue ridges.

当我走完最后一段台阶，登上天文台平台时，地球自己看起来就像一台超级计算机，在望远镜的声学反射下，山间昆虫嗡嗡作响，震耳欲聋。我首先在山顶注意到的并非天文台，而是喀斯特地貌。它们都是独立的，千奇百怪，好像是玛雅人在数百平方英里的范围内建造了巨大的金字塔，因为植被覆盖，所有都显得残破不堪。它们向各个方向延展，一直到天边，近一点的是墨绿，远山看起来是青色的脊。

Amid this landscape of chaotic shapes was the spectacular structure of the dish. Five football fields wide, and deep enough to hold two bowls of rice for every human being on the planet, it was a genuine instance of the technological sublime. Its vastness reminded me of Utah’s Bingham copper mine, but without the air of hasty, industrial violence. Cool and concave, the dish looked at one with the Earth. It was as though God had pressed a perfect round fingertip into the planet’s outer crust and left behind a smooth, silver print.

在失序的地貌间是壮观的抛物面，有五个足球场宽，其深度够星球上每个人盛两碗饭出来。这是技术崇高性的典范。其浩瀚让我想到犹他州的宾汉铜矿，却没有那种草率的工业化暴力感。抛物面冷冷地凹了下去，静静地观察，好似上帝将他完美的圆形指尖按在行星的地壳上，留下平滑的、银色的指纹。

I sat up there for an hour in the rain, as dark clouds drifted across the sky, throwing warbly light on the observatory. Its thousands of aluminum-triangle panels took on a mosaic effect: Some tiles turned bright silver, others pale bronze. It was strange to think that if a signal from a distant intelligence were to reach us anytime soon, it would probably pour down into this metallic dimple in the planet. The radio waves would ping off the dish and into the receiver. They’d be pored over and verified.

我冒着雨在那里坐了一个小时，乌云飘过天空，将光婉转地投射到天文台上。数千块铝制三角板呈现出斑驳的色彩：有的是亮银，有的是淡青。要是有朝一日收到遥远的智慧生命发来的讯息，可能就倾泻在星球上这块金属涟漪上，想想就觉得怪异。无线电波会从抛物面上弹开，进入接收器。它们将被仔细分析并验证。

International protocols require the disclosure of first contact, but they are nonbinding. Maybe China would go public with the signal but withhold its star of origin, lest a fringe group send Earth’s first response. Maybe China would make the signal a state secret. Even then, one of its international partners could go rogue. Or maybe one of China’s own scientists would convert the signal into light pulses and send it out beyond the great firewall, to fly freely around the messy snarl of fiber-optic cables that spans our planet.

国际上有条约要求透露第一次接触的情况，可这并非约束性的。可能中国会将信号公之于众，却不说起源于何处，以免某个边缘组织会发出地球的第一条回应。可能中国会将信号视作国家机密。即便如此，某个国际合作伙伴可能也会泄密。也或许中国某个科学家会将信号转为光脉冲，翻过防火墙，让其自由地遍布星球的复杂混乱的光纤网络中翱翔。

In Beijing, I had asked Liu to set aside dark-forest theory for a moment. I asked him to imagine the Chinese Academy of Sciences calling to tell him it had found a signal. How would he reply to a message from a cosmic civilization?

在北京，我要刘慈欣暂时不考虑黑暗森林理论。我问他，假设中科院打电话给他表示发现了信号。他会如何给宇宙文明作出答复。

He said that he would avoid giving a too-detailed account of human history. “It’s very dark,” he said. “It might make us appear more threatening.” In Blindsight, Peter Watts’s novel of first contact, mere reference to the individual self is enough to get us profiled as an existential threat. I reminded Liu that distant civilizations might be able to detect atomic-bomb flashes in the atmospheres of distant planets, provided they engage in long-term monitoring of life-friendly habitats, as any advanced civilization surely would. The decision about whether to reveal our history might not be ours to make.

他说他会避免太过详细地叙述人类历史。“那太黑暗了，”他说。“可能让我们显得太具威胁了。”在彼得·沃茨有关第一类接触的小说《盲视》中，只说到个人就足以让我们看起来威胁别人的生存。我提醒刘慈欣，遥远的文明如果长期观测宜居星球的话，所有先进文明肯定会如此，他们或许可以在遥远行星的大气层中检测到核弹爆炸。是否透露我们的历史，这个决定可能不是我们说了算的。

Liu told me that first contact would lead to a human conflict, if not a world war. This is a popular trope in science fiction. In last year’s Oscar-nominated film Arrival, the sudden appearance of an extraterrestrial intelligence inspires the formation of apocalyptic cults and nearly triggers a war between world powers anxious to gain an edge in the race to understand the alien’s messages. There is also real-world evidence for Liu’s pessimism: When Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast simulating an alien invasion was replayed in Ecuador in 1949, a riot broke out, resulting in the deaths of six people. “We have fallen into conflicts over things that are much easier to solve,” Liu told me.

刘慈欣对我说，第一类接触可能会导致人类争端，即便不是一场世界大战。这在科幻小说中是常见的梗。去年奥斯卡提名电影《降临》中，地外智慧的突然出现激发了我们的末世崇拜，几乎导致世界大国间的一场战争，他们都急切地希望在竞赛中拔得头筹，率先解读出外星人的消息。刘慈欣的悲观看法还有现实证据：1949年，当奥森·威尔斯的模拟一场外星入侵的广播剧《世界大战》在厄瓜多尔重播时，发生了暴乱，结果导致六人死亡。“我们陷入那些更容易解决的冲突中去。”刘慈欣对我说。

Even if no geopolitical strife ensued, humans would certainly experience a radical cultural transformation, as every belief system on Earth grappled with the bare fact of first contact. Buddhists would get off easy: Their faith already assumes an infinite universe of untold antiquity, its every corner alive with the vibrating energies of living beings. The Hindu cosmos is similarly grand and teeming. The Koran references Allah’s “creation of the heavens and the earth, and the living creatures that He has scattered through them.” Jews believe that God’s power has no limits, certainly none that would restrain his creative powers to this planet’s cosmically small surface.

即使并未出现地缘政治冲突，人类肯定也会经历剧烈的文化转型，地球上每个信仰体系都与第一类接触这一基本事实相冲突。佛教徒好过一点，他们的信仰假设存在无数古老的浩瀚宇宙，宇宙的每一个角落里都充满着生命的振动能量。印度教的宇宙同样宏大而丰富。 《古兰经》中提到安拉“创造了天地，创造并散播生命”。犹太人相信上帝的力量无边，当然没有任何东西可以把他的创造里局限在星球这个小小的地方。

Christianity might have it tougher. There is a debate in contemporary Christian theology as to whether Christ’s salvation extends to every soul that exists in the wider universe, or whether the sin-tainted inhabitants of distant planets require their own divine interventions. The Vatican is especially keen to massage extraterrestrial life into its doctrine, perhaps sensing that another scientific revolution may be imminent. The shameful persecution of Galileo is still fresh in its long institutional memory.

基督教就不好过了。当代基督教神学有一个争论，基督的圣恩是否会延伸到广阔宇宙中的每一个灵魂，或遥远行星的罪恶居民是否需要他们自己的神祇的干预。梵蒂冈似乎特别热衷于将外星生命纳入其教义之中，这让我们感觉到也许另一场科学革命即将来临。在其宗教记忆中，可耻地迫害伽利略仍然令人难忘。

Secular humanists won’t be spared a sobering intellectual reckoning with first contact. Copernicus removed Earth from the center of the universe, and Darwin yanked humans down into the muck with the rest of the animal kingdom. But even within this framework, human beings have continued to regard ourselves as nature’s pinnacle. We have continued treating “lower” creatures with great cruelty. We have marveled that existence itself was authored in such a way as to generate, from the simplest materials and axioms, beings like us. We have flattered ourselves that we are, in the words of Carl Sagan, “the universe’s way of knowing itself.” These are secular ways of saying we are made in the image of God.

世俗的人文主义者也免不了因第一类接触而变得清醒。哥白尼用日心说将人类从宇宙的中心拉了出来，而达尔文把人类归入了动物界。但即使在这个框架内，人类也一直把自己看成是自然进化的巅峰，依然残暴地对待“低等”生物。我们已经惊奇地发现，存在本身竟是最简单的材料和公理创造了我们这样的生命。用卡尔·萨根的话来说，我们自以为自己是“宇宙理解自身的方式”，这同认为我们是上帝按自己的形象创造的如出一辙，不过是一种世俗化的说法。

We may be humbled to one day find ourselves joined, across the distance of stars, to a more ancient web of minds, fellow travelers in the long journey of time. We may receive from them an education in the real history of civilizations, young, old, and extinct. We may be introduced to galactic-scale artworks, borne of million-year traditions. 

兴许有一天我们会谦卑地发现自己超越群星，加入到一个更古老的诸文明网络之中，与漫长时间旅程中的其他旅行者汇合。我们会从他们那里接受一个真实的文明史观教育，发现那些年轻的、古老的、或是灭绝的文明。我们可能会看到那些星系尺度上有着上百万年传统的人造之物。

We may be asked to participate in scientific observations that can be carried out only by multiple civilizations, separated by hundreds of light-years. Observations of this scope may disclose aspects of nature that we cannot now fathom. We may come to know a new metaphysics. 

我们可能会被邀请参与科学观测，这种观测只能由像个数百光年的多个文明协同进行，观测可能让我们认识到现在尚无法理解的自然本质，让我们认识到一种新的形而上学。

If we’re lucky, we will come to know a new ethics. We’ll emerge from our existential shock feeling newly alive to our shared humanity. The first light to reach us in this dark forest may illuminate our home world too.

如果幸运，我们将会获知一种新的道德伦理。我们将从命运共同体刚刚意识到的存在危机感中挣脱出来。在这个黑暗森林中，我们接到的第一束光也会照亮我们的家园。