VOA常速英语:Scientists Seek Answers to Are We Alone?

The Hubble telescope has given us spectacular pictures from space, but they’re not detailed enough to help us in our search for life in the trillions of galaxies across the universe.If tens of percent of stars have planets that could resemble the earth and could potentially have life,then the implications are that there are billions of them just within our Milky Way galaxy.
哈勃望远镜让我们得以目睹太空的壮丽奇景，但是如果想在宇宙中数以万亿的星系中找到生命的存在，哈勃望远镜的图片还不够清晰。倘若十个星球中有几个星球环境类似于地球、而且可能有生命存在的话，那就意味着我们银河系中，有数十亿这样的星球。

As a member of the NAS Committee on Exoplanet Science Strategy, Justin Crepp focused on how and what the United States will explore in space over the next decade.
Justin Crepp是美国国家科学院委员会外行星战略委员会的成员，他重点关注未来十年美国探索太空的内容和方式。

In September, the Committee released a report detailing several recommendations to do just that.First, it encourages NASA to develop and launch a space-based mission,specifially to image and characterize earth-like planets around the stars, but that’s not easy. If you try to image a planet, you run into several difficulties straight away.One is that their separation is very small on the sky, so you need a certain sized telescope to do that. The problem is that Earth’s atmosphere blurs out the images and so it exacerbates that problem.
九月，委员会发布了一份报告，报告详细阐述了探索太空的几个建议。首先，它鼓励NASA开发并发射太空观测基地，专门用于拍摄和描绘恒星周围的类地球行星，但是这谈何容易。如果你试着对行星进行成像，你会直接遇到这样几个困难。一个是星体间在空中的距离非常小，所以你需要一个尺寸合适的望远镜。问题在于地球上的大气让图像变得模糊，所以这个问题更加棘手了。

The committee believes the NASA mission collecting data from above the Earth’s atmosphere and more powerful equipment could resolve that issue, which leads to the second recommendation,building two large ground-based telescopes that will produce images 10 times sharper than that of the Hubble Space Telescope.In his lab, Crepp and his colleagues work on other new equipment.Highly sophisticated equipment will also help with another recommendation, completing the partially-funded wide-field Infrared Survey telescope.When launched into space, it will not only search for planets hundreds of light-years away,it will gather information on what they’re made of and if they could support life.That Crepp says could answer an age-old question.
该委员会认为，NASA从地球大气层以上收集数据的方式以及更加强大的设备可以解决这个问题，第二种建议也因此应运而生，那就是建两个大型的地面望远镜，其成像将比哈勃空间望远镜清晰10倍。在Crepp的实验室中，他和同事们正在研究其他新的设备。尖端设备有助于实现另一种建议，即完成部分资助的宽视场红外探测望远镜。当它被发射到太空时，它不仅会搜寻数百光年以外的行星，它还会收集有关行星构成以及它们是否能够支持生命的信息。对于此，Crepp表示这也许能回答一个古老的问题。

Are we alone? This is a question that impacts not only science but theology and philosophy and other areas, and so it’s a curiosity.It’s part of being human.Is our world’s special? Is it isolated or other other planets out there that could have life? Can we communicate with them?Other recommendations to start to answer those questions include building state-of-the-art equipment,developing a network for teens around the world to collaborate and creating an investor program to fund it all.The report will be reviewed by the US Congress and used in the federal plan to search for new planets and extraterrestrial life over the next decade.
宇宙只有我们吗？这是一个不仅影响着科学、神学甚至哲学和其他领域的问题。因此，这是一个谜团。这也是人类的一部分。我们的世界是独特的吗？它是与世隔绝的、还是说远离此地还有其他有生命的星球存在？我们能和他们交流吗？推荐回答这些问题的方式包括建立最先进的设备，为世界各地的青少年开发一个网络寻求共同合作，开发一个投资计划以寻求资助。该报告将接受美国国会审查，并应用于联邦计划，以在未来十年寻找新的星球和外星生命

For VOA news I’m Erika Celeste in Notre Dame Indiana
美国之音新闻，我是Erika Celeste，印第安纳州圣母院报道。