项目:天壤之别

制片人、导演兼作家克里斯·莱利一直在比较火星和地球上的着陆点。你能帮忙吗?
2021年10月26日

采访

克里斯。莱利

火星

宇航员需要更快的宇宙飞船,更好的辐射防护和隔热罩,才能亲自欣赏火星景观。

分享

今年是火星探测任务取得成功的一年。东英吉利大学的“希望”号卫星进入轨道,中国的第一个探测器在火星表面着陆,人们一直在努力寻找火星生命的迹象。目前还没有什么进展,但也许克里斯能帮我们理清头绪。我们最近的宇宙邻居火星上的每个着陆点都是火星的缩影,但如果我们的位置颠倒了呢?如果我们住在火星上,试着挖掘更多关于地球的信息呢?那些着陆点会是什么样子?早在2月份,在《perseverance》发布之前,Chris就在Medium上创建了一个名为《Worlds Apart》的项目。把火星上的着陆点转移到地球上各自的位置。克里斯,我们有多少着陆点,是什么让你想到这个主意的?

克里斯:当我在二月份做这个实验时,有八个火星着陆点可供选择,它们实际上都是美国宇航局的项目,其他太空机构也曾尝试过,但都没有成功。但美国宇航局已经八次成功实现软着陆。我这样做的原因是,我的朋友们一直在看我传回来的这些全新的火星照片,他们会说,哦,它看起来和上一张一样,天空有点红,地面有点红,岩石是岩石,沙子是沙子。再去一次有什么意义?我想抓住它们,摇一摇,然后说,不,我的背景是地貌学,我的博士学位是地貌学,每一个地点都是独一无二的。它们只是看起来颜色一样,因为火星上没有这种美丽的生物多样性的地幔,这给了我们一系列特殊的景观。所以,我想我应该通过将照片与地球上相同的纬度和经度进行比较来引起人们对火星真实面貌的关注。当我开始做这个的时候,我不知道我会发现什么,我以前从来没有研究过这个。结果发现,火星上的8个着陆点中有5个,与地球上的一些巨大海洋,大西洋和太平洋相对应。我发现有趣的是,当然不可能看到任何生命。 There was no evidence of life and there was the prospect of life because they were wet, unlike Mars it's very dry, but there was no actual life visible, it was just these big waterscapes. So two of the three locations then mapped onto our boreal forests - Bikin, a forest in Eastern Siberia and the Phoenix polar lander on Mars, touched down in the equivalent place of Tuktut Nogait National Park in Northern Canada. So these places give us a glimpse of life, relatively simple plant-like life, mostly trees and bushes. And then the Curiosity Rover landed in the only spot that was sort of equatorial, an equatorial rainforest in west Papua New Guinea, the equivalent of that on Earth. And this had a greater diversity of life in sight on just a random snapshot of it. But again, it was mostly plant life. I couldn't see any creatures in this sort of random shot I managed to pull out of there. So what was very remarkable was the Earth wasn't quite as varied as I thought it was going to be actually number one and number two, there wasn't any sign of human life, actually. So, I thought, how much actually of Earth have we kind of changed? So when I looked that up, it's 3% of Earth's planetary surfaces where we inhabit. Incredibly, 7-8 billion of us only take up our towns and cities, 3%. But our outreach beyond that to sustain our lives takes up 50 to 70% of it. And yet still these eight points on earth actually were so remote that they bear no marks of us at all. Even these days with Google Earth and Street View, it's very hard to get precise pictures of these exact locations. I had to be a bit more vague actually with where I was picking them. We talked about this back at the beginning of this year on his Digital Planet show on the World Service, BBC World Service. And I pointed out at that time that the Perseverance lander, which was just about to touch down, it's a big, amazing six-wheel rover, NASA's latest one, was going to land on a site that was actually a bit more inhabited relatively to the place on Earth, in a place called Telangana, about a hundred miles northeast of Hyderabad. So, I tracked down a school that was nearby in a place called Sawali, a little, tiny little school and a polytechnic in a town nearby called Loni. And I reached out to both of them and said, Hey, but I never heard back from them. They're such rural locations. They don't have real reliable internet connections. So, I tried Astronomers Without Borders next and that network, which goes around the globe, had loads of Indian contacts. That didn't work either. So I'm afraid to say, I still haven't managed to...

哈利-我们还少一个?

克里斯-我们还差一个。从火星和地球上拍摄要容易得多。

还有一段路要走,但也许在未来,如果有人现在在听,他们应该在附近的什么地方?他们离你有多近才能帮你,克里斯?

克里斯-是的。好吧,好吧。如果有人在听,有兴趣联系我,在海得拉巴山顶西北一百公里处,那附近请联系我。我很想知道。同样,正如你们所知,中国在几周后首次在火星上着陆了“天文一号”着陆器,巧合的是,这个地点位于中国南部的一个地区,非常随机,位于桂林西南40公里处。所以,如果有人想在桂林郊外的森林里徒步旅行,也请联系我们。

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