(单词翻译:单击)
We have, through science over the last 400 years, come to have a really deep understanding of the natural world. But so far that deep understanding doesn't include us.
通过过去400年的科学研究，我们对自然世界有了真正深刻的认识。但到目前为止，这种深刻的理解却还不包括我们。
It's really important in an age when we're being faced with existential threats on a regular basis to understand our place in the cosmos.
在这个经常面临潜在生存威胁的时代了解我们在宇宙中的位置非常重要。
And I think unless we actually really address the question of 'What is life?' we're not really gonna understand ourselves in the context of the systems that we live in.
我认为除非我们真正解决“生命是什么?”的问题， 否则在我们生活的系统中，无法真正了解我们自己。
Because we don't know what life is, we don't know where in the universe to look for it.
因为我们不知道生命是什么，我们在宇宙中也就无从去寻找它。
My biggest worry is that we might just completely miss discovering it because we actually don't really have an idea what we're looking for. And we're thinking about the definitions of life the wrong way.
我最担心的是，我们可能会完全错过发现它的机会，因为实际上我们并不知道在寻找什么。我们对生命定义的理解是错误的。
I'm Sara Walker and I'm an astrobiologist. What that means is that I'm really interested in understanding if there's life elsewhere in the universe, but I'm also really interested in just understanding ourselves.
我是莎拉·沃克，一名天体生物学家。这意味着我对了解宇宙中其他地方是否有生命很感兴趣，但也对了解我们自身很感兴趣。
And so most of my work is really focused on understanding the origin of life on Earth.
所以我的大部分工作都专注于了解地球上生命的起源。
To do that, my group is building ensembles of thousands of organisms and thousands of ecosystems and looking at properties of their chemistry.
为了做到这一点，我的团队正在构建成千上万个有机体和生态系统的集合，并观察它们的化学性质。
On Earth, we're surrounded by life, but we have no idea how common or rare living systems are in the universe.
在地球上，我们被生命包围着，但我们不知道宇宙中生命系统是多么多普遍或稀少。
We have no idea how many different forms life can take, no notion of what limits there are to its size or the timescales it operates on. We might've encountered alien life already and not recognized it.
我们不知道生命可以有多少种不同的形式，也不知道它的大小和运行的时间尺度有什么限制。我们可能已经遇到过外星生命，但却没有意识到。
There's this assumption that we make that because we are alive, we actually recognize life when we see it, or we understand what life is, and I think that's actually a really flawed viewpoint.
存在这样一种假设，因为我们是活着的，所以当我们看到生命体时，我们就能认出它或者理解生命是什么，我认为这实际上是一个存在瑕疵的观点。
For a long time, it was thought if we see oxygen in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, that is a sign of life, and we will be able to claim victory that we have discovered aliens.
很长一段时间以来，人们认为如果在一颗系外行星的大气中探测到氧气，那就有生命的迹象，我们就可以宣称已经发现了外星人。
But as scientists thought about it a little bit more, it turns out you can make atmospheric oxygen pretty easily with simple models that don't even contain life.
但随着科学家们思考的深入，结果发现，可以很容易地用简单的模型制备出大气中的氧气，但这些模型甚至不包含生命体。
We really need a more general definition for life that doesn't depend on the specific chemistry that life on Earth uses but is more characteristic of what life is as a process that organizes chemistry and does all of the wonderful things that we associate with living matter.
我们真的需要一个对生命更普遍的定义，它不依赖于地球上生命使用的特定化学物质，而是更具有生命本身的特征，是一个组织化学物的过程并能做所有我们认为与生命有关的奇妙事情。
So I, for example, have a very broad definition of life that includes things like technology.
例如，我对生命体有了一个非常宽泛的定义，包括像技术之类的东西。
Part of the reason for that is if you found a phone on Mars, you might not think that you discovered life, but you certainly would think you discovered evidence of life.
部分原因是，如果你在火星上发现了一部电话，你可能不会认为发现了生命，但你肯定会认为发现了有生命存在的证据。
Because the likelihood of that phone being there is zero without a living process putting it there. Life is literally the physics of creativity. It's the creative process in the universe.
因为如果没有活生生的过程，那部电话在那里的可能性就是零。生命就是创造力的物理化过程，是宇宙中创造性的过程。
It's not an individual in that process, it's the entire process of how does information originate in the universe, and how does it expand through space and time to construct all of the things that we associate with life?
在这个过程中，它不是个体，而是整个过程中信息是如何在宇宙中起源的，它又是如何通过空间和时间扩展来构建我们认为与生命有关事物的呢？
