英语听力：自然百科 行星旅行指南：火星 Mars—16

 If we are looking for Martian bugs¹, we should search for life forms at least as tough and alien as this.

 

“I’m looking at Mars in a point of view of a microbe. And as a microbe, I really need very, very tiny amount of water. I could probably live my entire life happily in a tiny drop of water about the size of the point of a pen. Now we’ve shown over the years that organisms living in salt crust on the earth have enough sunlight coming in so that they can go through their day-to-day activities but still be protected from the radiation. And we know there’s salt crust on Mars.”

 

Mars has a long term wobble to its orbit and every five million years or so the poles end up titling 45 degrees toward the sun. 

 

“A way of thinking about the Phoenix² landing site is thinking about the polar regions on earth. Imagine you are there in winter,/ very inhospitable, very cold, very alien. You think how can anything survive here. Come back six months later and it’s like a different world. The sun is shining, it’s wet, it’s warm. Things are alive and skirring around. So we may be being misled seeing it’s frozen, cold site. And in fact, we are just there at the wrong season.”

 

We know that on earth, some bacteria can survive being frozen for millions of years. They can also eat perchlorate, a highly reactive chemical Phoenix found in the Martian soil. 

 

“Presumably if there was life at the Phoenix site, it had learned the same trick. So there might be organisms that are literally³ eating the rocks and reacting with perchlorate, below the surface, shielded from the ultraviolet light, just having a great old time five million years ago. The party is over because every body froze, but another five million years, the party will start up again as the Martian summer comes to the north polar regions and the ice turns to water.”

 

 

1 bugs   

adj.疯狂的，发疯的n.窃听器( bug的名词复数 )；病菌；虫子；[计算机]（制作软件程序所产生的意料不到的）错误

参考例句：

• All programs have bugs and need endless refinement. 所有的程序都有漏洞，都需要不断改进。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The sacks of rice were swarming with bugs. 一袋袋的米里长满了虫子。 来自《简明英汉词典》

2 phoenix   

n.凤凰，长生(不死)鸟；引申为重生

参考例句：

• The airline rose like a phoenix from the ashes.这家航空公司又起死回生了。
• The phoenix worship of China is fetish worship not totem adoration.中国凤崇拜是灵物崇拜而非图腾崇拜。

3 literally   

adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实

参考例句：

• He translated the passage literally.他逐字逐句地翻译这段文字。
• Sometimes she would not sit down till she was literally faint.有时候，她不走到真正要昏厥了，决不肯坐下来。