人和星系

In man's early days, competition with other creatures must have been critical. But this phase of our development is now finished. Indeed, we lack practice and experience nowadays in dealing with primitive conditions. I am sure that, without modern weapons, I would make a very poor show of disputing the ownership of a cave with a bear, and in this I do not think that I stand alone. The last creature to compete with man was the mosquito. But even the mosquito has been subdued by attention to drainage and by chemical sprays.

Competition between ourselves, person against person, community against community, still persists, however; and it is as fierce as it ever was.

But the competition of man against man is not the simple process envisioned in biology. It is not a simple competition for a fixed amount of food determined by the physical environment, because the environment that determines our evolution is no longer essentially physical. Our environment is chiefly conditioned by the things we believe. Morocco and California are bits of the Earth in very similar latitudes, both on the west coasts of continents with similar climates, and probably with rather similar natural resources. Yet their present development is wholly different, not so much because of different people even, but because of the different thoughts that exist in the minds of their inhabitants. This is the point I wish to emphasize. The most important factor in our environment is the state of our own minds.

It is well known that where the white man has invaded a primitive culture, the most destructive effects have come not from physical weapons but from ideas. Ideas are dangerous. The Holy Office knew this full well when it caused heretics to be burned in days gone by. Indeed, the concept of free speech only exists in our modern society because when you are inside a community, you are conditioned by the conventions of the community to such a degree that it is very difficult to conceive of anything really destructive. It is only someone looking on from outside that can inject the dangerous thoughts. I do not doubt that it would be possible to inject ideas into the modern world that would utterly destroy us. I would like to give you an example, but fortunately I cannot do so. Perhaps it will suffice to mention the nuclear bomb. Imagine the effect on a reasonably advanced technological society, one that still does not possess the bomb, of making it aware of the possibility, of supplying sufficient details to enable the thing to be constructed. Twenty or thirty pages of information handed to any of the major world powers around the year 1925 would have been sufficient to change the course of world history. It is a strange thought, but I believe a correct one, that twenty or thirty pages of ideas and information would be capable of turning the present-day world upside down, or even destroying it. I have often tried to conceive of what those pages might contain, but of course I cannot do so because I am a prisoner of the present-day world, just as all of you are. We cannot think outside the particular patterns that our brains are conditioned to, or, to be more accurate, we can think only a very little way outside, and then only if we are very original.

FRED HOYLE Of Men and Galaxies

New words and expressions 生詞與短語

dispute

v. 爭奪

mosquito

n. 蚊子

subdue

v. 征服

drainage

n. 下水系統(tǒng)

envision

n. 預(yù)想

Morocco

n. 摩洛哥

latitude

n. 緯度

heretic

n. 異教徒，異端邪說

conceive

v. 想像

suffice

v. 足夠

nuclear

adj. 原子彈的

original

adj.有獨到見解的

本文參考譯文

在人類早期，人類與其他生物的競爭一定是必不可少的。但這個發(fā)展階段已經(jīng)結(jié)束。確實，我們今天缺乏對付原始環(huán)境的實踐和經(jīng)驗。我斷定，如果沒有現(xiàn)代化的武器，要我和一只熊去爭洞穴，我會出洋相的;我也相信，出洋相者并非我一人。能與競爭的生物最后只有蚊子，然而即使蚊子，也由于我們注意清理污水和噴灑化學(xué)藥品就被制服了。

然而人類之間的戰(zhàn)爭，人與人，團體與團體，依然在進行著，而且和以前一樣激烈。

但是，人與人的競爭并不像生物學(xué)中想像的那樣是一個簡單過程。它已不是為爭得物質(zhì)環(huán)境所決定的東西所決定。摩洛哥和加利福尼亞是地球上緯度極其相似的兩個地方，都在各自大陸的西海岸，氣候相似，自然資源也可能相似。但是，這兩個地方目前的發(fā)展程度完全不一樣。這倒不是因為人民不同，而是由于居民頭腦中的思想不同。 這是我要強調(diào)的論點。我們環(huán)境中最重要的因素就是我們的思想狀況。

眾所周知，凡是白人侵入原始文化的地方，破壞作用最大的不是殺人的武器，而是思想。思想是危險的。宗教法庭對此是非常清楚的，因此從前它總是把異教徒燒死。的確，言論自由的概念只存在于我們現(xiàn)代社會中，因為當(dāng)你生活在一個社團中時，社團的風(fēng)俗習(xí)慣會嚴格地制約你，使你很難有破壞性的想法。只有外部的旁觀者才能灌輸危險的思想。向現(xiàn)代世界灌輸一種思想以便摧毀我們?nèi)祟愂强赡艿氖�，對此我并不懷疑。我愿為你舉個例子，但幸虧我舉不出。也許提一下核彈就足以證明了。對一個尚未擁有核彈、但科技相當(dāng)發(fā)達的社會，如果告訴它制造核彈的可能性，而且向它提供制造核彈的細節(jié)，那么可以設(shè)想，這將對這個社會產(chǎn)生何等的影響。如果把二三十頁的情報交給1952年前后的任何一個世界強國，就足以改變世界歷史的進程。二三十頁材料中的思想和情報會將當(dāng)今的世界翻天覆地，甚至毀滅這個世界。這是個離奇的想法。不過我認為這個想法是正確的。我常常試圖想像這些紙上所寫的東西，不過我是做不到的，因為我和你們大家一樣，是當(dāng)今世界上的凡人。我們不能脫離我們大腦所限定的模式去思考問題，我們只能稍微離開一點兒，就這也需要我們有獨創(chuàng)的思想。

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