为什么埃隆·马斯克的SpaceX发射令人沮丧？ [英国媒体]

Why Elon Musk’s SpaceX launch is utterly depressing

英国卫报：为什么埃隆·马斯克的SpaceX发射令人沮丧？



Elon Musk is right: silly and fun things are important. But some of them are an indefensible waste of resources

埃隆·马斯克是对的：愚蠢而有趣的事情是重要的。但是其中一些事情浪费资源也是无可辩解的。

On Wednesday, two things happened. In Syria, 80 people were killed by government airstrikes. Meanwhile, in Florida, Elon Musk fired a sports car into space. Guess which story has dominated mainstream news sites?

星期三，发生了两件事。在叙利亚，有80人死于政府空袭。同时，在佛罗里达州，埃隆·马斯克发射了一辆跑车到太空。猜猜哪个故事占据了主流新闻网站呢？

The much-anticipated launch of Musk’s Falcon Heavy rocket, the most powerful ever launched by a private company, went off without a hitch. Musk successfully sent his cherry-red Tesla roadster hurtling toward Mars, launching what a CNN commentator called “a new space age”.

此次埃隆·马斯克猎鹰重型火箭的发射万众瞩目，对于私人公司来说是史上最强大的一次发射，火箭顺利无阻地起飞了。马斯克成功地让樱桃红的特斯拉跑车Roadster飞向火星，开启了美国有线电视新闻网评论员所称的“一个新的太空时代”。

Musk expects the rocket and car to orbit the sun for hundreds of millions of years, though some experts have speculated that they will disintegrate within a year. The event attracted phenomenal publicity: at one point, 2.3 million viewers were watching the event’s livestream, making the rocket launch a masterstroke of advertising for Tesla.

马斯克预计火箭和跑车会绕着太阳转上亿万年，但是一些专家推测它们会在一年内解体。这次事件引起了现象级的公众关注：一度有230万的观众在观看发射直播，这使得此次的火箭发射成为了特斯拉绝妙的广告。

Meanwhile, in Syria, where hundreds of thousands of refugees may be forced to return to unsafe homes amid “global anti-refugee backlash”, an anti-government activist said despondently that he was no longer sure why he bothers to videotape the effects of bombing, since nobody ever pays attention: “I don’t know what the point is.” The UN human rights coordinator for Syria pondered what level of violence it would take to make the world care, saying officials were “running out of words” to describe the crisis.

同时，在“全球反难民潮”中，成千上万的叙利亚难民可能会被迫返回危险的家园。一个反政府的活动者沮丧地说，他不知道为什么他要费劲去录下轰炸的场景，因为没有人会关注：“我不知道这有什么意义。”联合国叙利亚人权协调员在思考能引起世界关注的暴力程度，并表示说这场危机“已经难以用语言来表达”。

There is, perhaps, no better way to appreciate the tragedy of 21st-century global inequality than by watching a billionaire spend $90m launching a $100,000 car into the far reaches of the solar system.

但也许可以，看一个亿万富翁花9000万美元把10万美元的汽车发射到遥远的太阳系，没有什么比这更能感受叙利亚这个二十一世纪全球不平等的悲剧了。

Musk said he wanted to participate in a space race because “races are exciting” and that while strapping his car to a rocket may be “silly and fun … silly and fun things are important”. Thus, anyone who mentions the colossal waste the project involves, or the various social uses to which these resources could be put, can be dismissed as a killjoy.

马斯克说他想参加太空竞赛，因为“比赛令人兴奋”，而把他的汽车绑到火箭上可能是“愚蠢而有趣的，但是愚蠢和有趣的事情是重要的”。因此，任何人提及该项目巨大的资源浪费，或者那些被浪费的资源本可以用作各种社会用途时，都可能被当作一个扫兴的人。

But one doesn’t have to hate fun to question the justification for pursuing a costly new space race at exactly this moment. If we examine the situation honestly, and get past our natural (and accurate) feeling that rockets are really cool, it becomes hard to defend a project like this.

但是在这个时刻，人们不必为了质问追求一次昂贵的新太空竞赛的合理性而去讨厌有趣的事情。如果我们诚实地审视形势，抛开我们“火箭真酷”的第一直观感受，就很难去为这样的一个项目辩解了。

A mission to Mars does indeed sound exciting, but it’s important to have our priorities straight. First, perhaps we could make it so that a child no longer dies of malaria every two minutes. Or we could try to address the level of poverty in Alabama that has become so extreme the UN investigator did not believe it could still occur in a first-world country. Perhaps once violence, poverty and disease are solved, then we can head for the stars.

一个去到火星的任务听起来确实让人兴奋，但是分清轻重缓急是很重要的。首先，也许我们可以做些事情让每两分钟不再有一个孩子死于疟疾。或者，我们可以设法解决阿拉巴马州的贫困状况，这种贫困已经变得如此极端，连联合国调查员都认为这还不可能发生在第一世界国家。也许一旦暴力、贫穷和疾病问题得到解决，我们才是时候走向宇宙。

注释：美国最贫穷的5个州（阿拉巴马州、肯塔基州、阿肯色州、西弗吉尼亚州、密西西比州）

Many might think that what Elon Musk chooses to do with his billions is Elon Musk’s business alone. If he wanted to spend all his money on medicine for children, that would be nice, but if he’d like to spend it making big explosions and sending his convertible on a million-mile space voyage, that’s his prerogative.

很多人可能会认为埃隆·马斯克选择怎么花他的数十亿是他自己的事情。如果他想把所有的钱都花在儿童医疗上，那很好。但如果他愿意把钱花在发射火箭，把他的敞篷跑车送去太空旅行，那也是他的权利。

But Musk is only rich enough to afford these indulgent pet projects because we have allowed gross social inequalities to arise in the first place. If wealth were actually distributed fairly in this country, nobody would be in a position to fund his own private space program.

但是马斯克是唯一能够负担得起这些烧钱项目的人，因为我们从一开始就允许严重的社会不平等。如果这个国家的财富确实是公平分配的话，那就没有人能够为自己的私人空间项目提供资金了。

Yet even on the theory that there’s no moral problem with frittering away hundreds of millions of dollars, and inequality is fine, there’s another reason we are permitted to be concerned about what Musk does. A great deal of his fortune is not actually his own: it’s ours.

即使在理论上挥霍掉数亿美元是没有道德问题的，而且不平等现象也是可以接受的，但是，我们还有另一个理由可以关注马斯克的行为---他的巨额财产实际上不是他自己的：是我们的。

Musk’s empire is fueled by billions of dollars in government subsidies. The Los Angeles Times revealed in 2015 that Musk’s companies benefitted from “grants, tax breaks, factory construction, discounted loans and environmental credits”, plus the tax credits and rebates that are granted to consumers for buying his products.

马斯克商业帝国的发展得益于政府数十亿美元的补贴。洛杉矶时报2015年透露，马斯克的公司受益于“各种补助、税收减免、工厂建设和贴息贷款”，再加上政府给予消费者购买马斯克公司产品时的减税和退税政策。

注释：discounted loans 贴息贷款，指借款人从商业银行获得贷款所需的利息，由政府有关机构或民间组织全额或部分负担，借款人只需按照协议归还本金或少部分的利息。

The average household income of a Tesla purchaser is in the hundreds of thousands, yet the federal government pays people $7,500 to buy them through tax credits, and many states offer their own cash handouts. Because we’re all giving Elon Musk money, what he chooses to do with that money is very much our business.

购买一辆特斯拉汽车需要很多钱，但是联邦政府通过减税让购买特斯拉汽车的人免付了7500美元，并且许多州对此都有提供现金补贴。因为我们都在给埃隆·马斯克钱，所以他决定用那笔钱去做什么事情，这就跟我们有很大的关系。

Elon Musk is right: silly and fun things are important. But some of them are an indefensible waste of resources. While there are still humanitarian crises such as that in Syria, nobody can justify vast spending on rocketry experiments. That point was made plain in 1970 by the poet Gil Scott-Heron, on his record Whitey On the Moon, which criticized the US for spending millions to send men on a pointless moon adventure while the country’s inner cities languished:

埃隆·马斯克是对的：愚蠢而有趣的事情是重要的。但是其中一些事情浪费资源也是无可辩解的。因为像叙利亚这样的人道主义危机仍然存在，所以没有人能为需要庞大开支的火箭试验辩解。在1970年，美国黑人诗人兼歌手吉尔·斯科特·赫隆在他的歌曲Whitey On the Moon中将这一点体现得淋漓尽致，那首歌抨击了美国花费数百万美元把人送去月球做毫无意义的探险，却不顾美国国内城市的衰落。

Whitey may not have gone back to the moon recently. But his sports car is now in space. 

白人最近可能不会再去月球了，但是他的跑车现在在太空。

注释：Gil Scott-Heron吉尔·斯科特·赫隆，美国诗人、音乐家和作家吉尔，是美国音乐界公认的“说唱教父”。政治性是他作品的最大特征，也让他在黑人音乐世界里独树一帜，并对后世的众多音乐家形成深远影响。
Whitey On the Moon这首歌虚构了在商业社会下信用破产，人们被迫移民月球的故事。