2. 外语
  3. When imaginative men turn their eyes towards space and wonder whether life exists in and any part of it, they may cheer themselv

When imaginative men turn their eyes towards space and wonder whether life exists in and any part of it, they may cheer themselv

admin2010-07-19  81
问题    When imaginative men turn their eyes towards space and wonder whether life exists in and any part of it, they may cheer themselves by remembering that life need not resemble closely the life that exists on Earth. Mars looks like the only planet where life like ours could exist, and even this is doubtful. But there may be other kinds of life based on other kinds of chemistry, and they may multiply on Venus or Jupiter. At least we cannot prove at present that they do not.
   Even more interesting is the possibility that life on their planets may be in a more advanced state of evolution. Present-day man is in a peculiar and probably temporary stage. His individual units retain a strong sense of personality. They are, in fact, still capable under favorable circumstances of leading individual lives. But man’s societies are already sufficiently developed to have enormously more power than the individuals have.
   It is not likely that this transitional situation will continue very long on the evolutionary time scale. Fifty thousand years from now man’s societies may have become so close-knit that the individuals retain no sense of separate personality. Then little distinction will remain between the organic parts of the multiple organisms and the inorganic parts (machines) that have been constructed by it. A million years further on man and his machines may have merged as closely as the muscles of the human body and the nerve cells that set them in motion.
   The exploration of space should be prepared for some such situation. If they arrive on a foreign planet that has reached an advanced stage (and this is by no means impossible), they may find it being inhabited by a single large organism composed of many closely cooperating units.
   The units may be "secondary"—machines created millions of years ago by a previous form of life and given the will and ability to survive and reproduce. They may be built entirely of metals and other durable materials. If this is the case, they may be much more tolerant of their environment, multiplying under conditions that would destroy immediately any organism made of carbon compounds and dependent on the familiar carbon cycle.
   Such creatures might be relics of a past age, many millions of years ago, when their planet was favorable to the origin of life, or they might be immigrants from a favored planet. (401 words)
The passage is mainly concerned with ______.
选项 A、the feasibility of life existing on other planets
B、the description of Mars’s physical environment
C、the comparison between the physical features of Mars and the Earth
D、the feasibility of men’s migrating onto Mars
答案A
解析 第一段指出了本文旨在说明的问题。有关第一段参阅第58题题解。以下各段对第一段中提出的问题进行了分析和猜想。
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