2018.04.NO.5(Note)

05-14

New study has a theory for why we haven』t found aliens yet, and it makes a whole lot of sense.

有一個新的理論可以有理有據的說明為什麼我們到現在仍然沒有發現外星人。

The article "New study has a theory for why we haven』t found aliens yet, and it makes a whole lot of sense." is published in an e-newspaper BER , and the original writer is Mike Wehner. For practicing，i read it and translate the view of Mike Wehner into Chinese . Because of the mindset of the practicing , i will not strictly translate the answer word by word , but just write down my explanation .

New study has a theory for why we haven』t found aliens yet, and it makes a whole lot of sense?

bgr.com

即使到現在為止，人們已經長久的凝望著宇宙空間，不過科學家們仍然沒有發現任何智慧生命ood的一下飛馳在我們頭頂的現象。宇宙誠然是巨大的，所以我們往往用「宇宙太大了」這一個借口來解釋我們在發現外星文明上的無能。一個來自西班牙加迪斯大學新的論文認為事實並非我們一直所想的那樣，真正的原因非常有可能是：我們僅僅只是看不見地外生命。

Mankind has been gazing（凝望） into space for some time now, but scientists still haven』t found any evidence that intelligent life exists in our neck of the cosmic oods. The universe is, of course, huge, so we normally just assume（假設） that our inability to etect alien civilizations is due to the fact that they』re just too far away. A new report by esearchers at the University of Cadiz in Spain suggests that maybe that』s not actually the case, pointing to a very different possibility: we』re simply blind to their existence.

人類科學家在搜尋外星人時有一個錯誤的方向，那就是尋找和人類有共性的東西。研究揭示，（在未知地區尋找相似生物）這一先入為主的觀念，會傷害我們尋找那些隱藏在熟悉地區的外星人的能力。

Human scientist have an unfortunate（遺憾的，不成功的） tendency to look for alien civilizations that are, well, human-like. This preconceived notion that life as we know exists elsewhere could be hampering our ability to detect alien life hiding in plain sight, the study explains.

被發表在期刊Acta Astronautica上的一個成果表明，

The work, which was published in the journal Acta Astronautica, discusses the possibility of alien life existing in a way that humans quite literally cannot fathom. It』s both scary and fascinating to imagine, but it does make a good bit of sense when you suspend your disbelief for a moment.

「What we are trying to do with this differentiation is to contemplate other possibilities,」 Gabriel de la Torre, a neuropsychologist who co-led the study, explains.「For example, beings of dimensions that our minds cannot grasp; or

intelligences based on dark matter or energy, which make up almost 95 percent of the universe and which we are only beginning to glimpse. There is even the possibility that other universes exist, as the texts of Stephen Hawking and other scientists indicate.」

To prove that humans are often misguided by their own expectations, the researchers conducted an experiment where they asked 137 people to determine whether structures and features in a number of aerial photographs were either manmade or natural. In one of the photographs, the researchers hid a tiny image of a gorilla to see whether or not the subjects would spot it. The participants did as they were told, but many of them completely missed the gorilla simply because they weren』t specifically looking for it.

The team calls this unintentional bias is called inattentional blindness, and they suggest that a similar phenomenon may be happening with astronomers and the scientific community on a larger scale. Put simply, if we don』t know what we should be looking for, we likely won』t find anything at all, which is exactly what has happened up to this point in the search for alien life.