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It was December 1971, and NASA was getting ready to launch Pioneer 10, a spacecraft that would sweep by Jupiter and make the first reconnaissance of the solar system's biggest planet. More stunningly, though, Pioneer 10's brush by Jupiter would sling it onto an interstellar trajectory, making it the first ever human-made object destined to leave the solar system.
那是在1971年12月，美国国家航空航天局正准备发射“先驱者10号”，这艘宇宙飞船将探索木星，对太阳系最大的行星进行首次侦察。但更让人吃惊的是，“先驱者10号”越过了木星，飞掠到了星际轨道上，这使它成为了第一个飞离太阳系的人造物体。
With a little help from his friends, the astronomer Carl Sagan decided that the craft ought to carry a greeting from humanity -- a message identifying and commemorating Pioneer's makers that would be interpretable by anyone who found it. NASA agreed and gave Carl less than a month to design the message.
在朋友们的帮助下，天文学家卡尔·萨根决定，该飞船应该携带一份来自人类的问候，即一份标识和纪念先驱号制造者的信息，让发现它的人都能翻译出来。NASA同意了，并给了卡尔不到一个月的时间来设计该信息。
This is when Carl's friend, the astronomer Frank Drake, enters the story. Frank is also my dad, and among other notable accomplishments, he is credited with conducting the first scientific search for noisy aliens and with formalizing a framework for estimating the number of detectable alien civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.
这时，卡尔的朋友、天文学家弗兰克·德雷克参与了其中。弗兰克也是我的父亲，在他的诸多成就中，他被承认是对吵闹的外星人进行第一次科学研究，并形成了一个框架，来估算在银河系中可探测到的外星文明的数量。
