囧研究：美国航天局可能已经访问过地球了？

NASA was set up in part to find traces of extraterrestrial life in the universe. While the government space agency has yet to find any definitive evidence that extraterrestrials exist, one NASA scientist believes we may have already been visited by them here on Earth.

美国国家航空航天局建立之初就是为了找到宇宙中的外星生物，但是至今未找到确切证据证明外星人的存在，航天局某科学家认为外星人可能已经到访过地球了。

In a new research paper, Silvano P. Colombano, who in addition to being a computer scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, is also a professor, theorizes that intelligent life may not be what we are used to and may not necessarily use the traditional building blocks of that humanity is accustomed to, such as carbon.

美国航天局研究中心的计算机专家兼教授萨瓦努在研究报告中阐述了相关理论，说明外星人可能和人类不同，身体的基本元素非碳。

So if extraterrestrials are not carbon-based, what does that do to our assumptions about what to look for? Well, a lot, Colombano noted.

如果外星人不依靠碳元素存在，我们要靠什么来寻找外星生物呢？萨瓦努表示有多种方式。

Colombano also suggests that extraterrestrials may have figured out technology that humans can not comprehend yet, making tasks such as interstellar travel possible. "If we adopt a new set of assumptions about what forms of higher intelligence and technology we might find, some of those phenomena might fit specific hypotheses, and we could start some serious enquiry," he suggested.

萨瓦努还说外星人可能已经理清了人类无法理解的技术，大概已经能够进行星际移动了。“如果我们对高等生物和科技做出一系列设想，有些现象是能与之对应的，继而可以提出一些严肃的问题。”

"Considering further that technological development in our civilization started only about 10K years ago and has seen the rise of scientific methodologies only in the past 500 years, we can surmise that we might have a real problem in predicting technological evolution even for the next thousand years, let alone 6 Million times that amount!" he explained.

“仔细想想，人类文明不过是一万年前才开始，在过去短短五百年间就见证了各种科学发明，我们可以猜想未来千年中，人类就会在科技革新中遇到问题，更不用说六百万年中我们遇到过多少问题。”

（翻译：阿忙）