这是一部有关现代科学发展史的既通俗易懂又引人入胜的书，作者用清晰明了、幽默风趣的笔法，将宇宙大爆炸到人类文明发展进程中所发生的繁多妙趣横生的故事一一收入笔下。惊奇和感叹组成了本书，历历在目的天下万物组成了本书，益于人们了解大千世界的无穷奥妙，掌握万事万物的发展脉络。
收获英语 收获一本好书~！

书本的朗读语音很charming的磁性英音~~~大家可以好好学着模仿哦~~~！！
因为原著为美国人所写,单词采用美式拼法,不抄全文,然后听写单词或词组(用[-No-]表示)以及句子(用[---No---]表示)。请边听写边理解文意，根据上下文注意各句标号，这样有助于提高正确率。



[---1---] Nobody knows how many stars there are in the Milky Way—[---2---]—and the Milky Way is just one of 140 billion or so other galaxies, many of them even larger than ours. In the 1960s, a professor at Cornell named Frank Drake, excited by such whopping numbers, worked out a famous equation designed to calculate the chances of advanced life in the cosmos based on a series of diminishing probabilities.

[---3---]; divide that by the number of planetary systems that could [-4-] support life; divide that by the number on which life, having arisen, [-5-]; and so on. At each such division, the number shrinks colossally—yet even with the most [-6-] inputs the number of advanced civilizations just in the Milky Way always works out to be somewhere in the millions.
Still, statistically the probability that there are other thinking beings out there is good. estimates range from 100 billion or so to perhaps 400 billion Under Drake's equation you divide the number of stars in a selected portion of the universe by the number of stars that are likely to have planetary systems theoretically advances to a state of intelligence conservative
不过，从统计角度来看，外层空间存在有思想的生物的可能性还是很大。谁也不清楚银河系里有多少颗恒星--估计有1000亿颗到4000亿颗--而银河系只是大约1400亿个星系之一，其他许多比我们的银河系还要大。20世纪60年代，康奈尔大学的一位名叫弗兰克•德雷克的教授为这么巨大的数字所振奋，根据一系列不断缩小的可能性，想出了一个著名的方程式，旨在计算宇宙中存在高级生命的可能性。 　　按照德雷克的方程式，你把宇宙某个部分的恒星数除以恒星可能拥有行星系的数；再用那个商除以理论上能够存在生命的行星系数；再用那个商除以已经出现生命，而且生命提高到了有智力的状态的行星系数；如此等等。每这样除一次，那个数字就大大缩小--然而，即使以最保守的输入，仅在银河系里，得出的高等文明社会的数字也总是在几百万个。