經典科幻文學:《銀河系漫遊指南》第8章 Part 1
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times over many years and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers.
The introduction begins like this:"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen ..." and so on.
(After a while the style settles down a bit and it begins to tell you things you really need to know, like the fact that the fabulously beautiful planet Bethselamin is now so worried about the cumulative erosion by ten billion visiting tourists a year that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete whilst on the planet is surgically removed from your bodyweight when you leave: so every time you go to the lavatory it is vitally important to get a receipt.)
To be fair though, when confronted by the sheer enormity of distances between the stars, better minds than the one responsible for the Guide's introduction have faltered. Some invite you to consider for a moment a peanut in reading and a small walnut in Johannesburg, and other such dizzying concepts.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination.
Even light, which travels so fast that it takes most races thousands of years to realize that it travels at all, takes time to journey between the stars. It takes eight minutes from the star Sol to the place where the Earth used to be, and four years more to arrive at Sol's nearest stellar neighbour, Alpha Proxima.
For light to reach the other side of the Galaxy, for it to reach Damogran for instance, takes rather longer: five hundred thousand years.
The record for hitch hiking this distance is just under five years, but you don't get to see much on the way.
《銀河系漫遊指南》是一本絕對非凡的書。它編輯和重新編輯了許多次，歷經許多年，經過許多不同的編輯者。它包含了無數漫遊者和研究者的心血。
書的前言是這樣開頭的：“太空，”它寫道，“廣袤無垠。確確實實廣袤無垠。你簡直不會相信它大得多麼驚心動魄。我是說，你也許認爲成爲一個煉金術士的路途是遙遠的，但跟太空相比只是滄海—粟。聽着……”諸如此類的話。
（開篇不久全書的風格就定下來了，開始告訴你你確實需要知道的東西。比如說，像神話一樣美麗的星球貝絲拉敏目前憂心忡忡由於每年上百億的遊客所造成的逐漸積累的侵蝕，其擔憂達到了這種程度，以至於規定在星球期間你攝入的量和排泄的量之間的淨差距必須在離開星球時通過手術從你的體重中取掉：所以每次上廁所時千萬千萬不能忘了要開張收據。）
爲了便於理解，當處理星球之間的巨大里程時，書中會採取一些比前言中更有效的辦法。有時它會請你設想—下這樣的情形：—顆花生在英格蘭的甲丁市，一顆小核桃在約翰內斯堡，還有其他像這樣令人眼花繚亂的概念。
一個簡單的事實是，星際間的距離遠遠超出了人類的想像。
即便是光——它運動得如此之快，大部分種族整整用了好幾千年才認識到它的運動——在星際間運行時也要花費不少時間。從人陽到曾經是地球的那片空間，光要走8分鐘，而要走4年才能到達距離太陽最近的恆星，半人馬座的比鄰星。
光如果要到達銀河系的另一端，比如說到達達蒙葛蘭，則需要更長的時間：整整50萬年。
搭便車通過這段距離的最快記錄是5年，不過以這麼快的速度旅行，你在路上是看不見多少東西的。
