All challenges big and small
All challenges big and small
大小挑战皆是挑战
When I was 18, I skipped my high school graduation and headed to Kuwait. It was 1991, the first Gulf War had just ended, and the country was in complete chaos. There was little to no electricity, aside from generator power. Rubble and unexploded ordnance were everywhere. Massive oil fires lit up the desert and dimmed the sky overhead. Everything had to be rebuilt, and fast. 18岁那年，我缺席了高中毕业典礼，只身前往科威特。那是1991年，第一次海湾战争刚刚结束，整个国家陷入一片混乱。除了发电机供电外，几乎没有电力供应。到处都是瓦砾和未爆炸的弹药。巨大的油井火灾照亮了沙漠，遮蔽了天空。一切都需要重建，而且必须迅速完成。
I was there to work on that reconstruction, part of an international effort to fix what war had broken. It was the first time I’d ever seen a truly massive engineering project with my own eyes. The challenge was one that had to be addressed on multiple fronts, simultaneously, to get an entire country back up and running. Everywhere you looked, there was something to do. 我当时在那里参与重建工作，这是修复战争创伤的国际努力的一部分。那是我第一次亲眼目睹如此宏大的工程项目。为了让整个国家恢复运转，我们必须在多个战线上同时应对挑战。放眼望去，到处都有做不完的工作。
I was mostly working with a labor crew to jump on quick fixes to things like windows and doors blown out in the fighting. But there were, of course, bigger jobs too. Most notably, there were those massive fires to put out. The Iraqi army had set hundreds of oil wells ablaze, the majority of which were still spewing soot and oil smoke into the air. 我主要与劳工队一起工作，负责修补在战斗中被炸毁的门窗等设施。当然，还有更艰巨的任务。最引人注目的是扑灭那些巨大的火灾。伊拉克军队点燃了数百口油井，其中大部分仍在向空中喷射煤烟和油烟。
On bad days, the sky would remain dark all day, and the air would burn your eyes and hurt your throat. It was so apocalyptic that none other than Carl Sagan warned of massive environmental consequences. If smoke from the oil fires reached the stratosphere, he predicted, the result could be akin to the 1815 explosion of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia, which triggered what’s known as “the year without a summer”; global temperatures dropped between 0.4 and 0.7 °C, and crops failed around the world. 在糟糕的日子里，天空整天昏暗，空气灼烧着双眼，让人喉咙刺痛。那景象宛如世界末日，连卡尔·萨根（Carl Sagan）都警告称这会带来巨大的环境后果。他预测，如果油井火灾产生的烟雾进入平流层，其后果可能类似于1815年印尼坦博拉火山（Tambora）的爆发，那次爆发引发了所谓的“无夏之年”——全球气温下降了0.4至0.7摄氏度，导致全球农作物歉收。
Fortunately, the plume from Kuwait never made it that high, and although temperatures did decline regionally, there was little effect on a planetary scale. As it turns out, predicting what will or won’t lower global temps is quite hard. (Reader, I am foreshadowing here.) 幸运的是，科威特的烟柱从未达到那样的高度，尽管局部气温确实有所下降，但对全球范围的影响微乎其微。事实证明，预测什么会或不会降低全球气温是非常困难的。（读者们，我在这里埋下了伏笔。）
Firefighters from companies with monikers like the Red Adair Company or Boots and Coots (as well as less colorfully named outfits, like Bechtel) rushed to Kuwait after the war’s end to figure out how to extinguish the gargantuan blazes and cap the wells. At a hotel in downtown Kuwait City, one of the few places with working phone lines, I would occasionally run into them covered head to toe in black oil and soot. 战争结束后，来自Red Adair公司或Boots and Coots公司（以及像柏克德Bechtel这样名字不那么花哨的机构）的消防员们赶赴科威特，设法扑灭这些巨大的火灾并封堵油井。在科威特城市中心的一家酒店里——那里是为数不多有电话线路的地方之一——我偶尔会遇到他们，他们全身都覆盖着黑色的石油和煤烟。
Putting out the fires took all sorts of creative thinking. Engineers working in the burning oil fields figured out they could repurpose existing pipelines meant to pump oil out to sea to instead pump water in from the Persian Gulf. One company from Hungary rigged up a firefighting machine called Big Wind by outfitting an old Soviet T-34坦克 chassis with two turbines from a MiG-21 fighter jet, each of which could blast 220 gallons of water per second. Sadly, I never got to see it in action (except in the movies). 扑灭这些火灾需要各种创造性的思维。在燃烧的油田中工作的工程师们想出了一种方法：将原本用于向海中输送石油的现有管道改造成从波斯湾抽取海水的管道。一家匈牙利公司组装了一台名为“大风”（Big Wind）的消防机器，他们在一辆旧的苏联T-34坦克底盘上安装了两台米格-21战斗机的涡轮发动机，每台发动机每秒能喷射220加仑的水。遗憾的是，我从未亲眼见过它作业（只在电影里看过）。
Other jobs were less cinematic but no less dire. The retreating Iraqi army had left booby traps all over. They snaked hand grenades into the plumbing (at a facility where I worked, among others). They planted mines everywhere, and those had to be found and removed. Many of them were small plastic “toe poppers” designed not to kill but to maim. Hunting them was a herculean effort. And although it was mostly successful, hundreds of thousands of them, by some estimates, still remain. 其他工作虽然没有那么强的电影感，但同样危急。撤退的伊拉克军队到处留下了诱杀装置。他们将手榴弹塞进管道系统（包括我工作的一处设施）。他们到处埋设地雷，这些地雷必须被找到并清除。其中许多是小型塑料“脚趾炸弹”（toe poppers），其设计目的不是为了杀人，而是为了致残。搜寻它们是一项艰巨的任务。尽管大部分工作取得了成功，但据估计，仍有数十万枚地雷残留。
Which is to say, we can’t fix everything. But we can be ambitious. We can take on the challenge of making the world better through human ingenuity. That’s what the July/August issue of MIT Technology Review is all about. 也就是说，我们无法修复一切。但我们可以心怀抱负。我们可以通过人类的智慧去迎接挑战，让世界变得更美好。这正是《麻省理工科技评论》7/8月刊的主题。
Sometimes the challenges we face are giant, if knowable, like tunneling beneath the seafloor. Some exist at the nanoscale and represent decades of investment and research, as is the case with ASML, a company with the singular ability to produce the machines that make the most advanced computer chips in the world. Others represent problems at a planetary scale and take us into truly unknown territory, like a future where we could engineer the veil of the Tambora volcano to cool the Earth on purpose. 有时我们面临的挑战是巨大的，但却是可知的，比如在海底挖掘隧道。有些挑战存在于纳米尺度，代表了数十年的投资和研究，例如ASML公司，它拥有制造世界上最先进计算机芯片设备的独特能力。另一些挑战则代表了全球规模的问题，将我们带入真正未知的领域，比如未来我们或许能模拟坦博拉火山的遮蔽效应，从而有目的地为地球降温。
By the end of my 90-day contract in Kuwait, instead of damage everywhere you looked you could see the fruits of a gargantuan international rebuilding effort. The air was not clean, exactly, but inhaling it no longer felt like smoking a pack a day. On the beach, which had been pocked with mines, people swam and splashed at the edge of the gulf. The lights were on. Water ran from the taps. The markets were open. It was a remarkably different place. 在我90天的科威特合同结束时，放眼望去，看到的不再是满目疮痍，而是巨大的国际重建努力所带来的成果。空气虽然算不上纯净，但呼吸起来不再像每天抽一包烟那样难受。在曾经布满地雷的海滩上，人们在海湾边游泳嬉戏。灯亮了，水龙头里流出了水，市场也开放了。这是一个截然不同的地方。
Yes, forces both within and beyond our control will always break things. People will invariably make mistakes, or act out of their own self-interest to the detriment of others. But we can also come together to get to work and, when the smoke clears, find we’ve made real progress. 是的，无论是在我们控制之内还是之外的力量，总会破坏事物。人们难免会犯错，或者为了自身利益而损害他人。但我们也可以团结起来共同努力，当硝烟散去时，我们会发现自己已经取得了真正的进步。