272 Mars
272 火星
For centuries, explorers have risked their lives venturing into the unknown for reasons that were to varying degrees economic and nationalistic. Columbus went west to look for better trade routes to the Orient and to promote the greater glory of Spain. Lewis and Clark journeyed into the American wilderness to find out what the U.S. had acquired when it purchased Louisiana, and the Apollo astronauts rocketed to the moon in a dramatic show of technological muscle during the cold war.
几个世纪以来，探险家冒着生命危险在探索能改变经济状况和社会发展的未知原因。哥伦布西行是为了寻找通往东方的更好的商业路线，以及推动西班牙进一步繁荣发展。刘易斯和克拉克来到美国荒野，探究美国在收购路易斯安那后的收获，以及冷战期间阿波罗宇航员乘火箭到达月球，展示了高科技力量的戏剧性。
Although their missions blended commercial and political-military imperatives, the explorers involved all accomplished some significant science simply by going where no scientists had gone before.
虽然他们的任务涉及的是商业，政治和军事领域，但是只要探险家们到没有科学家踏足的地方，就涉足了一些重要的科学领域。
Today Mars looms as humanity’s next great terra incognita. And with doubtful prospects for a short-term financial return, with the cold war a rapidly fading memory and amid a growing emphasis on international cooperation in large space ventures, it is clear that imperatives other than profits or nationalism will have to compel human beings to leave their tracks on the planet’s reddish surface. Could it be that science, which has long played a minor role in exploration, is at last destined to take a leading role? The question naturally invites a couple of others: Are there experiments that only humans could do on Mars? Could those experiments provide insights profound enough to justify the expense of sending people across interplanetary space?
如今火星似乎成为人类的下一个重大目标。由于令人担。忧的短期经济倒退，冷战带来的大萧条以及对加强大型企业之间国际合作的重视，很明显地，是命令而不是利益和民族主义，迫使人类离开红色星球轨道的表面。难道一直在探索中扮演着次要角色的科学，会最终转为带头作用7这个问题很自然地引起了一系列的争论：火星上存在只有人类才能做的试验吗？这些试验能提供具有深远意义的科学发现来抵消把人送上太空的巨额开销吗？
With Mars the scientific stakes are arguably higher than they have ever been. The issue of whether life ever existed on the planet, and whether it persists to this day, has been highlighted by mounting evidence that the Red Planet once had abundant stable, liquid water and by the continuing controversy over suggestions that bacterial fossils rode to Earth on a meteorite from valuable data about the range of conditions under which a planet can generate the complex chemistry that leads to life. If it could be established that life arose independently on Mars and Earth, the finding would provide the first concrete clues in one of the deepest mysteries in all of science: the prevalence of life in the universe.
因为火星的存在．人们对科学的期望也比以往高了，随着越来越多的证据证明红色星球上曾有丰富的，稳定的液态水，以及对细菌化石是否是落到地面的火星陨石的争议，人们关于行星上是否曾有人类生存过，是否至今仍然存在的争议更为突出了，一个关于火星上过去或现在的生命的比较确切的说法会给研究者们提供有关这种情形的无价的资料，这些资料可以表明在何种情形之下，行星可以产生形成生命的复杂的化学成分。如果能够证明火星和地球上能自发产生生命体，那么这项发现将首次为所有科学中最深的奥秘提供具体线索：那就是生命在宇宙中是普遍存在的。