万物简史 第644期:一个星球,一次实验(1)

（单词翻译）

30 GOOD-BYE

第三十章 一个星球，一次实验

In the early 1680s, at just about the time that Edmond Halley and his friends Christopher Wren¹ and Robert Hooke

17世纪80年代初，差不多就在埃德蒙.哈雷和他的朋友克里斯托弗.雷恩及罗伯特.胡克

were settling down in a London coffeehouse and embarking² on the casual wager³ that would result eventually in Isaac Newton's Principia , Henry Cavendish's weighing of the Earth,

坐在伦敦的一家咖啡屋里随便打赌的时候他们的这一赌注最终导致了艾萨克.牛顿的《原理》、亨利.卡文迪许关于地球的重量

and many of the other inspired and commendable⁴ undertakings⁵ that have occupied us for much of the past four hundred pages,

以及本书前面所提及的其他不少令人鼓舞和赞叹不已的成果的出现

a rather less desirable milestone⁶ was being passed on the island of Mauritius,

在印度洋上距离马达加斯加东海岸约1300公里的毛里求斯，

far out in the Indian Ocean some eight hundred miles off the east coast of Madagascar.

一件人们不愿意看到的重大事件正在发生。

There, some forgotten sailor or sailor's pet was harrying⁷ to death the last of the dodos,

在那里，有个不知道姓名的船员，抑或是他喂养的宠物，正在捕杀最后一批渡渡鸟。

the famously flightless bird whose dim but trusting nature and lack of leggy zip made it a rather irresistible⁸ target for bored young tars⁹ on shore leave.

这种鸟因其不能飞翔而著名，它呆头呆脑，容易上当，也缺少快速奔跑的能力，因此它成了来海滩度假的闲得无聊的年轻人富有诱惑力的捕猎目标。

Millions of years of peaceful isolation¹⁰ had not prepared it for the erratic¹¹ and deeply unnerving behavior of human beings.

数百万年与世隔绝的安宁生活，使得它对人类不可理喻的残忍行为缺少准备。

We don't know precisely¹² the circumstances, or even year, attending the last moments of the last dodo,

对于最后一只渡渡鸟消失时的情况，以及它灭绝的年份，我们并不是很清楚。

so we don't know which arrived first, a world that contained a Principia or one that had no dodos,

因此，牛顿《原理》的问世和渡渡鸟，的灭绝究竟谁先谁后，我们无从考证，

but we do know that they happened at more or less the same time.

但是我们可以肯定这两件事几乎发生在同一时间。

You would be hard pressed, I would submit, to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate¹³ the divine and felonious nature of the human being

我承认，你很难找得到同样的两件事来说明人类本性中的善与恶

a species of organism that is capable of unpicking the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction¹⁴,

同一种生物，一方面能够解开宇宙最深奥的秘密，另一方面却在无缘无故地灭绝

for no purpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn't even remotely capable of understanding what we were doing to it as we did it.

一种对我们不构成任何威胁，甚至对我们对它们所做的一切都浑然无知的生灵。

Indeed, dodos were so spectacularly short on insight, it is reported,

事实上，渡渡鸟是如此缺乏洞察力，据说，