国家地理:送给外星人的地图(6)（在线收听）

Several years ago, two significant things happened. I found the original, penciled-in pulsar map, folded away and casually tucked into a tomato box in my parents' closet. And I linked up with a rock climber named Scott Ransom, one of the world's more prolific pulsar astronomers.

几年前发生了两件重要的事。其一，我找到了这幅脉冲星地图用铅笔绘制的原本，它被折起来，随意放在我父母橱柜里放西红柿的容器内。其二，是我和一位喜好攀岩的男子斯考特·兰森有了交集，他也是世界上对脉冲星钻研最深的天文学家之一。

Scott had been thinking about the Voyagers, the "golden record," and the pulsar map since he was a 10-year-old in Mansfield, Ohio, watching Carl's Cosmos television show. Some years and an astronomy Ph.D. later, he realized that Dad's map has a near-future expiration date. Its Achilles' heel is the same property that lets it pinpoint Earth in time: Pulsars slow down, and the ones Dad had chosen (from the few known at the time) would fade and disappear within several million years, give or take a few millennia.

自从十岁在俄亥俄州曼斯菲尔德家中看到卡尔的电视节目《宇宙》之后，斯考特就一直在考虑着有关旅行者号、“金唱片”和脉冲星地图的事情。多年之后，斯考特取得了天文学博士学位，他开始意识到我父亲的这幅地图在不久的未来就会失效。这幅地图的致命缺陷恰恰源自能让它准确指出地球时间维度的同一个特性：脉冲星自转速度会减慢，而我父亲从当时已知的少数脉冲星中挑选出的那一些，会在几百万年内消失，误差大约在几千年。

Coincidentally, Scott had set out to make a new, more precise, and longer-lived pulsar map even before we moved in together and portmanteau'd ourselves into the Dranksomes. Now I write the words that tell our stories, and Scott does the important cartographic stuff such as choosing pulsars and deriving their binary codes. He occasionally drafts some text passages, but you'll never catch me committing academic acts of astronomy.

巧的是，早在我们同居并将彼此的姓氏合并成德瑞克森前，斯考特就已着手绘制一幅更精确、能使用更久的新脉冲星地图。如今我负责书写我们的故事，斯考特则负责重要的制图工作，例如挑选脉冲星并推算它们的二进制编码。他偶尔会起草一些文章段落，但你永远不会看到我在进行天文学的学术研究。