TED英文演说-寻找微小的外星人中英文演讲稿.docx

第 第 PAGE 1 页 The search for microscopic aliens 00:06 [SHAPE YOUR FUTURE] 00:09 I want to find aliens. Finding life on another planet is not just going to be a little hard, its going to be very hard. But for the first time in human history, we have a chance to detect signs of life on another planet. Or maybe weve already detected it on Venus. Or maybe not. There are still two big hurdles when it comes to confirming life on another world. The first is building a telescope big enough to do this, and the second is interpreting what we will find. When we think of extraterrestrial life, we tend to think of aliens like funny little green men, not aliens as single-celled microbes. But its actually detecting signs of microbial life on another planet that Im most optimistic about, and what I focus my research on. 00:54 I model how a stars high-energy radiation can make gases from microbes harder or easier to see with future telescopes. Microbes have dominated our planets biosphere for most of Earths history. Theyve been emitting gases that can be seen in our atmosphere -- even light years away -- for billions of years. Now, if an alien astronomer were looking at Earth, they would probably detect gases like oxygen, methane and nitrous oxide before detecting signs of us. Even with an active biosphere like Earths, most of the gases that indicate life are coming from single-celled microbes, not from animals. This is what well try to do in the next decade of astronomy -- try to find signs of microbial life on planets orbiting other stars. But the technology to detect the atmosphere of a planet the size of Earth around another sun is incredibly difficult. Its like trying to determine the size of a firefly in front of a spotlight while looking from another continent. Whats amazing is that with telescopes in the 2020s, were overcoming this technological barrier. 01:58 The second issue defining alien life will be to interpret what these biosignature gases actually mean. Twent