国家地理:送给外星人的地图(3)

Carl asked Dad for help crafting the message while the two of them were in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Dad recalls that, in the lobby of the San Gerónimo Hilton, he and Carl quickly came up with ideas about what to include: line drawings depicting humans, a rendering of the spacecraft -- and then, "in the next moment, we hit on the idea of a galactic map that would pinpoint the location of the Earth in space."

在参加于波多黎各的圣胡安举办的美国天文学会的一次会议时，卡尔请父亲帮忙设计该信息。父亲回忆说，在圣杰洛尼摩希尔顿酒店的大厅里，他和卡尔很快提出了该信息应包含的内容的想法：描绘人类的线图、宇宙飞船的渲染图，“但就在接下来的一瞬间，我们突然想到了一张能确定地球在宇宙中位置的银河地图的这个主意。”

Dad designed that map, and in 1972 it flew into space aboard Pioneer 10. The next year Pioneer 11 launched, ultimately carrying the map past Saturn and now on to the stars. Then in 1977 both Voyager spacecraft left Earth carrying Dad's guide to finding our planet, which is etched onto the cover of the "golden record." The way Dad designed the map means that it points back to Earth both in space and in time, making it a galactic positioning system (a different kind of GPS) in four dimensions.

随后父亲就开始设计这张地图，并在1972年先将其放入“先驱者10号”，使其进入了太空。第二年，“先驱者11号”发射升空，又带着这张地图掠过土星，现在正飞往其他星球。随后，在1977年，两艘“旅行者号”飞船搭载着父亲指引我们星球方位的地图飞离了地球，该地图被刻在了“金唱片”的封面上。父亲设计这张地图的方式，是使其在空间和时间上都指向地球，成为一个四维的银河定位系统（一种不同的GPS）。

At the time, Dad and Carl didn't really worry that the aliens who found their message in a bottle might be of the more malevolent variety.

在那时，父亲和卡尔并不担心，那些在瓶子里发现了他们的信息的外星人，可能是非常邪恶的外星人。