科幻设备的前世今生

From tanks to the internet to videophones, science-fiction stories have had a long record of successfully anticipating future technology developments. There are many devices, though, that regularly pop up in movies and books about the future - but show no sign of working in reality.Or will they? Bilingual Time takes a look at past fantasies about the future, and whether they might ever be real.

从坦克到因特网再到视频电话，科幻故事成功预见未来科技发展的记录繁多。有些科技设备虽然经常会在关于未来的电影或书籍中突然出现，但在现实中却没有存在的迹象。或者以后会吗？《双语时代》回顾过去人们对将来的一些幻想，看看它们有没有成为现实。

1) Raygun 射线枪

Science-fiction heroes are always zapping their phasers or their blasters at the bad guys. In the real world, however, hurtling bigger and bigger pieces of metal at high velocity remains the best way to hurt someone. Lasers big enough to do damage remain huge, bulky, immoveable things, needing power far beyond any handheld weapon. Still, the US and other armies have energy-based weapons in development, including non-lethal (but extremely painful) microwave weapons, as well as missile defence systems using lasers.

科幻故事中的男主人公总是持相位枪（又名光炮，是一种联邦舰队与其他帝国所使用的指向性能量武器，是科幻创作《星舰奇航记》中出现的武器之一）迅速地朝敌人射出能量射线。然而在现实中，猛烈地甩出大块金属片依然是击伤对方最有效的方法。足以造成破坏的大型激光器依然是庞大笨重难以搬移的设备，搬动起来比任何手持武器都费力。不过美国和其它国家军队正在研发以能源为基础的武器，包括非致命（但会造成极度的痛苦）微波武器，以及导弹防御系统使用的激光器。

2) Jetpacks 喷气推进器

Zooming about in the sky has been a staple of fantasies of the future since the 1930s, but, although real jetpacks exist, they're highly unstable and consume far too much fuel to be useful.Astronauts use them during space walks sometimes, but otherwise their use is limited to stunts and showtime performances. A typical jetpack only gives you about 30 seconds of flight - and extremely dangerous flight at that!

自20世纪30年代起，在空中快速飞旋就已经是未来世界的幻想主题之一。但是，虽然现实中喷气推进器已经存在，但它们太不稳定而且耗能高不实用。宇航员有时会将它们用于太空行走，除此之外它就只能用于杂技和一些节目表演中。一个标准的喷气推进器只能让你飞30秒，而且这种飞行还非常危险。

3) Translation Devices翻译器

Worried about meeting an alien race for the first time and having to communicate through hand gestures and grunts like an American in a Beijing Mcdonalds? Instant translators, which turn one language into another, have been an excuse to have everyone seem like they're talking English in many a science-fiction show. Real life mechanical translation, though, is long, painful, inaccurate, and can only be done with text. The next ten years will see much better mechanical translation, say experts, but still probably only with written languages - voices remain exceptionally hard for computers to process.

曾经会为这个担心吗？与老外第一次见面因为语言不通而不得不一边打着手势一边咕哝着说话来进行交流，就像北京麦当劳里的美国佬一样。将一种语言转译为另一种语言的即时翻译器已经使得科幻节目中的每个人似乎都会说英语。现实生活中的机器翻译冗长，让人费解还不准确，并且只能在有上下文的情况下才能进行翻译。专家说再过十年将会出现更好很多的机器翻译，不过可能还是局限于书面语言，计算机还是很难处理语音翻译。

4) Robots 机器人

Robots exist, of course, but they're nothing like the androids of movies like Star Wars - they're just very specialised machinery, mostly used in automation lines. One of the niftiest recent uses for robots has been for remote surgery, using a robot hand and a computer link to let surgeons thousands of miles away perform operations by proxy. Intelligent humanoid robots seem extremely unlikely, though there are steps forward - Sony's ASIMO robot, which looks like a little spaceman, can hold hands, recognize faces, and walk without falling over too much.

机器人当然存在，但是它们绝不像电影《星球大战》中的机器人，它们只是一些非常专业化的机器，绝大部分都用于自动线。最近机器人运用得最为成功的例子是用于远程外科手术，外科医生在千里之外通过一个机器人手臂和与之连接的计算机进行手术操作。智能人形机器人似乎极不可能做到这点，虽然它们改进了很多，比如索尼的ASIMO机器人看上去像一个小型宇航员，它会握手，识别人脸，行走稳定不会摔太多跤。

5) Artificial Intelligence 人工智力

Sentient computers have often been presented as figures of menace, like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey or Skynet in the Terminator movies. It looks like this is one threat we don't have to worry about, though; the predictions of AI enthusiasts have been spectacularly off. While computers can excel in very specialized and number-crunching skills, nobody has yet managed to create any kind of general reasoning ability, or even taken more than the baby-steps to theorize how it could be created.

智能电脑总是以构成威胁的形象出现，如《2001：太空奥德赛》中的HAL和《终结者》中的Skynet。这种威胁在我们看来似乎不必担忧，但人工智能爱好者所预见的景象却十分壮观。虽然计算机在特别专业与超大数字计算等技术领域胜过人类，但目前还没有谁能够制造出具有正常推理能力的计算机，甚至连制造这种计算机进一步的理论都没有。

6) World Government世界政府

OK, this isn't a gadget, but it's such a staple of science-fiction that we had to include it. Sci-fi stories and movies often posit a single world government, with all the people of Earth united in relative harmony. As a quick glance at the TV news shows, this one ain't happening. Right-wing paranoids, particularly in the United States, fantasize that the UN is moving towards this, but the UN can barely agree on what colour paper to use, yet alone on how the world should be run.

是的，这不算科技玩意儿，但是这也属于科幻类的东西，所以我们还是将它纳入科技酷品。科幻故事和电影经常设想一个独一无二的世界政府，全世界人们相对和谐地联合为一个整体。当快速地看一眼电视新闻便知道这个设想不可能会实现。右翼狂想分子，特别是在美国，都幻想联合国正在朝这一方向走去，但联合国只能决定用什么颜色的纸等不痛不痒的问题，更别说该怎样管理世界了。

7) Floating Cities 漂浮的城市

Imagine a city that soars in the sky, or that floats permanently upon the sea! In an increasingly crowded world, this is a common fantasy - but one that's not likely to come true anytime soon.The resources to build such a thing would be immense, and the only effort so far, a bizarre American project called the Liberty Ship which aimed to present a permanent sea-going home for 50 000 people mostly looking to dodge national taxes, seems to be more scam than practical project. Land reclamation, though, is being pioneered by small nations or cities such as Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, dumping new earth into the sea to create artificial islands or extend the existing coastline.

设想一座城市浮在空中，或永久地浮在海面上！面对这个日益拥挤的世界，有这种幻想很正常，但在短期内这不太可能成为现实。要修建这么个庞然大物，需要大量资源，目前为此所做的努力只是美国一个称为《自由轮》的奇怪工程，这个工程的目标是建造一个可以容纳50000人永久航行的家园，居住在船上的人多是为了逃避国家税款。这个工程似乎比现实中的工程更像个骗局。然而一些小国和城市，如日本、香港和新加坡都正率先进行填海造地工程，将土壤倒入海中，造建人工海岛或延长现有的海岸线。

8) Space Colonization 太空殖民地

This world may be going to hell, but living on other worlds doesn't look like a very likely prospect either. At present, it would take centuries or millenia for spaceships to reach other solar systems, yet alone ones with inhabitable planets - if they even exist. One solution that's been proposed is terraforming the rest of our solar system, transforming Mars and Venus into planets like earth through ecological engineering. It's way out of our reach at the moment, but recent discoveries that Mars has a significant water supply have lent hope to scientists dreaming of a Martian vacation home.

这个世界也许将会毁灭，但是去另一个星球居住似乎也不太可能。目前来看，人类要花几个世纪甚至上千年才能使宇宙飞船进入其它太阳系，还必须是具有适宜生存条件的星球——假如这些星球存在的话。一个已经设想出的解决办法是转变我们所在的太阳系的其它星球，利用生态工程将火星和金星转变成像地球一样的星球。目前人类还无法实现这些，但最新发现显示火星可以提供大量的水资源，这使梦想有一个火星度假家园的科学家们有了希望。