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Part V Life Itself
第五部 生命本身
The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming. Freeman Dyson
我越是審視宇宙，越是研究其構造上的具體細節，就越是覺得在某種意義上宇宙肯定已經知道我們快要到來。——弗里曼·戴森
16 Lonely Planet
第十六章 孤獨的行星
It isn't easy being an organism. In the whole universe, as far as we yet know, there is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging.
成為生物很不容易。據我們所知，在整個宇宙里，只有銀河系里一個名叫地球的、不大醒目的邊遠地方愿意收留你，而且連它也可能不大情愿。
From the bottom of the deepest ocean trench to the top of the highest mountain, the zone that covers nearly the whole of known life, is only something over a dozen miles—not much when set against the roominess of the cosmos at large.
從最深的海底溝底部到最高的大山頂點，已知生命的幾乎全部生存范圍只有28公里左右厚——與浩瀚的宇宙相比，那算不了什么。
For humans it is even worse because we happen to belong to the portion of living things that took the rash but venturesome decision 400 million years ago to crawl out of the seas and become land based and oxygen breathing. In consequence, no less than 99.5 percent of the world's habitable space by volume, according to one estimate, is fundamentally—in practical terms completely—off-limits to us.
對于人類而說，那就更倒霉了。我們恰好是屬于那個部分的動物：4億年以前，他們草率而又冒險地作出決定，從海底爬上來，成為以陸為家和呼吸氧氣的動物。結果據有人估計，世界上有近99.5%的適居空間，基本上——實際上是完全——對我們關上了大門。
It isn't simply that we can't breathe in water, but that we couldn't bear the pressures. Because water is about 1,300 times heavier than air, pressures rise swiftly as you descend— by the equivalent of one atmosphere for every ten meters (thirty-three feet) of depth.
我們在水里不僅不會呼吸，而且受不了那個壓力。這是因為，水要比空氣重1 300倍，你越是往深處，壓力越是迅速增加——深度每增加10米，就相當于增加1個大氣壓。
