TED演讲之伟大预言 马丁·里斯:这是我们最后的世纪吗?(2)
On a still bigger scale, we see entire galaxies of stars. We see entire ecosystems where gas is being recycled.
在更大的范围里，我们看到恒星组成的星系。我们看到完整的生态系统，看到气体被回收利用。
And to the cosmologist, these galaxies are just the atoms, as it were, of the large-scale universe.
对于宇宙学家来说，这些星系只不过是组成大规模宇宙空间的原子。
This picture shows a patch of sky so small that it would take about 100 patches like it to cover the full moon in the sky.
这张照片展示了一小片天空，它是如此之小，需要用大约100块同样尺寸拼接在一起才能遮住天空中的满月。
Through a small telescope, this would look quite blank, but you see here hundreds of little, faint smudges.
用台稍小的天文望远镜，这个区域看似空无一物。但是现在你能看到这里有成百个微小的暗淡色块。
Each is a galaxy, fully like ours or Andromeda, which looks so small and faint because its light has taken 10 billion light-years to get to us.
每个都是一个星系，类似我们的银河系或仙女星系。它们看似微小和暗淡是因为它们发出的光经历了上百亿光年才到达这里。
The stars in those galaxies probably don’t have planets around them.
那些星系中的恒星可能没有行星环绕。
There’s scant chance of life there — that’s because there’s been no time for the nuclear fusion in stars to make silicon and carbon and iron, the building blocks of planets and of life.
存在生命的可能性甚微 – 因为在那无足够的时间允许恒星进行核聚变，产生行星和生命所必需的构造元素，如硅、碳和铁等。
We believe that all of this emerged from a Big Bang — a hot, dense state.
我们相信所有这一切都源于一次大爆炸 – 一个极热、极密态。
So how did that amorphous Big Bang turn into our complex cosmos?
那么，那个无定形的大爆炸是如何演变成我们复杂的宇宙的呢？
I’m going to show you a movie simulation 16 powers of 10 faster than real time,
我将播放一段模拟影片，播放速度是实际时间的10的16次方倍速，
which shows a patch of the universe where the expansions have subtracted out.
演示宇宙的一小部分如何在膨胀中延展开来。
But you see, as time goes on in gigayears at the bottom, you will see structures evolve as gravity feeds on small, dense irregularities, and structures develop.
你可以看到，底部显示的时间以十亿年为单位，随着引力逐渐作用于细微的不均匀密度分布，空间物质结构缓慢地演化出来。
And we’ll end up after 13 billion years with something looking rather like our own universe.
于是在历经130亿年之后，大致有形似我们的宇宙般的结构显露出来。
And we compare simulated universes like that — I’ll show you a better simulation at the end of my talk — with what we actually see in the sky.
这样可以供我们对两者进行比较 – 在我的发言结束时我会向大家展示一个更好的模拟 – 用我们实际从天空看到的样子。
Well, we can trace things back to the earlier stages of the Big Bang, but we still don’t know what banged and why it banged.
好吧，我们可以追溯到大爆炸后的早期场景，但我们仍然不知道到底是什么爆炸了以及为什么会爆炸。
演讲简介：
作为一个天文学家，同时作为人类社会中忧心忡忡的一员，马丁·里斯爵士从宇宙全景的视角考察我们的星球和其未来。他敦促要采取行动以避免科技发展过程中可能出现的毁灭性后果。