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Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct
人类注定要灭绝
Cast your mind back, if you will, to 1965, when Tom Lehrer recorded his live album That Was the Year That Was. Lehrer prefaced a song called “So Long Mom (A Song for World War III)” by saying that “if there's going to be any songs coming out of World War III, we’d better start writing them now.” Another preoccupation of the 1960s, apart from nuclear annihilation, was overpopulation. Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb was published in 1968, a year when the rate of world population growth was more than 2 percent—the highest in recorded history.
如果你不介意我这么说的话，回想一下1965年，汤姆·莱勒录制了他的现场专辑《That Was the Year That Was》。莱勒在一首名为《再见，妈妈，我去参加第三次世界大战了！》（关于第三次世界大战的一首歌）的歌开头写道：“如果有一首第三次世界大战的歌，我们最好现在就开始写。”20世纪60年代除了核毁灭以外，另一个困扰就是人口过剩。斯坦福大学生物学家Paul Ehrlich于1968年出版了《人口炸弹》一书，当年全球人口增长率为史上最高，超过了2%。
Half a century on, the threat of nuclear annihilation has lost its imminence. As for overpopulation, more than twice as many people live on the earth now as in 1968, and they do so (in very broad-brush terms) in greater comfort and affluence than anyone suspected. Although the population is still increasing, the rate of increase has halved since 1968. Current population predictions vary. But the general consensus is that it’ll top out sometime midcentury and start to fall sharply.
半个世纪过去了，核毁灭不再构成迫在眉睫的威胁。至于人口过剩，现在生活在地球上的人口是1968年的两倍多，而且（笼统地说）他们生活得比任何人想象的都更舒适和富裕。尽管人口仍在增长，但增长速度自1968年以来已减半。目前针对人口的预测各不相同。但普遍共识是，在本世纪中叶某个阶段人口会达到峰值，然后开始急剧下降。
As a paleontologist, I take the long view. Mammal species tend to come and go rather rapidly, appearing, flourishing and disappearing in a million years or so. The fossil record indicates that Homo sapiens has been around for 315,000 years or so, but for most of that time, the species was rare—so rare, in fact, that it came close to extinction, perhaps more than once.
我作为一名古生物学家，会从长远来看待此现象。哺乳动物从地球消失的速度往往相当快，从出现、繁殖到消失大约需要一百万年的时间。化石记录表明，人类已经存在了大约31.5万年，但大部分时间属于非常罕见的存在，事实上，人类真的非常罕见，甚至可能不止一次地濒临灭绝。
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