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30 GOOD-BYE
第三十章 一個星球，一次實驗
In the early 1680s, at just about the time that Edmond Halley and his friends Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke
17世紀80年代初，差不多就在埃德蒙.哈雷和他的朋友克里斯托弗.雷恩及羅伯特.胡克
were settling down in a London coffeehouse and embarking on the casual wager that would result eventually in Isaac Newton's Principia , Henry Cavendish's weighing of the Earth,
坐在倫敦的一家咖啡屋里隨便打賭的時候他們的這一賭注最終導致了艾薩克.牛頓的《原理》、亨利.卡文迪許關于地球的重量
and many of the other inspired and commendable undertakings that have occupied us for much of the past four hundred pages,
以及本書前面所提及的其他不少令人鼓舞和贊嘆不已的成果的出現
a rather less desirable milestone was being passed on the island of Mauritius,
在印度洋上距離馬達加斯加東海岸約1300公里的毛里求斯，
far out in the Indian Ocean some eight hundred miles off the east coast of Madagascar.
一件人們不愿意看到的重大事件正在發生。
There, some forgotten sailor or sailor's pet was harrying to death the last of the dodos,
在那里，有個不知道姓名的船員，抑或是他喂養的寵物，正在捕殺最后一批渡渡鳥。
the famously flightless bird whose dim but trusting nature and lack of leggy zip made it a rather irresistible target for bored young tars on shore leave.
這種鳥因其不能飛翔而著名，它呆頭呆腦，容易上當，也缺少快速奔跑的能力，因此它成了來海灘度假的閑得無聊的年輕人富有誘惑力的捕獵目標。
Millions of years of peaceful isolation had not prepared it for the erratic and deeply unnerving behavior of human beings.
數百萬年與世隔絕的安寧生活，使得它對人類不可理喻的殘忍行為缺少準備。
We don't know precisely the circumstances, or even year, attending the last moments of the last dodo,
對于最后一只渡渡鳥消失時的情況，以及它滅絕的年份，我們并不是很清楚。
so we don't know which arrived first, a world that contained a Principia or one that had no dodos,
因此，牛頓《原理》的問世和渡渡鳥，的滅絕究竟誰先誰后，我們無從考證，
but we do know that they happened at more or less the same time.
但是我們可以肯定這兩件事幾乎發生在同一時間。
You would be hard pressed, I would submit, to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being
我承認，你很難找得到同樣的兩件事來說明人類本性中的善與惡
a species of organism that is capable of unpicking the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction,
同一種生物，一方面能夠解開宇宙最深奧的秘密，另一方面卻在無緣無故地滅絕
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.
一種對我們不構成任何威脅，甚至對我們對它們所做的一切都渾然無知的生靈。
Indeed, dodos were so spectacularly short on insight, it is reported,
事實上，渡渡鳥是如此缺乏洞察力，據說，
