According to many people, the future of civilizati

单项选择题

We have had an industrial civilization for only 200 years and already we’re stockpiling nuclear weapons, overpopulating the planet, poisoning the air, the water and the soil, destroying fertile land, developing an energy crisis, and running low on resources.
Many think glumly that there is no solution to all this--that we are headed on a collision course with damnation and that we are the last generation of civilization. It can even be argued that this is the inevitable consequence of intelligence: that intelligent beings anywhere gradually develop a greater and greater understanding of the laws of nature until their power exceeds their wisdom and they destroy themselves. If that is so, we may find no evidence of civilizations elsewhere, not because none have developed, but because none have endured.
But if we: do find evidence of a civilization, one that is further advanced than our own (or its signals would not be so powerful as to reach us, since we can’t dispose of enough power to reach it), it would mean that at least one civilization had reached the crisis of power, surmounted it and survived. Perhaps it was differently constituted from our own and its beings were wiser---but perhaps it is just that the crisis that now seems so deadly to us is surmountable, given good will and strenuous effort.
The receipt of such signals could give us hope, then and remove the currently gathering despair just a little. Perhaps, if we are tottering on the brink, that hope can provide the added bit of strength that can pull us through and supply the crucial feather’s weight to swing the balance toward survival and away from destruction.
It is impossible to get no information at all from the signal. At the very least, its characteristics should tell us the rate at which the signal-sending planet revolves about its star and rotates about its axis, together with other physical characteristics of interest. Even ff a message seems unintelligible, astronomers can still try to interpret it, and that in itself is an interesting challenge, a fascinating scientific game. Even ff we cannot reach any conclusion as to specific items of information, we might reach certain generalizations about alien psychology and that, too, is valuable knowledge.
Besides, even the tiniest breaks in the code could be of interest. Suppose that from the message we get one single hint of some relationship unsuspected by ourselves that, if true, might give us new insight into some aspect of physics. Scientific advances do not exist in a vacuum. That one insight could then stimulate other thoughts and, in the end, greatly accelerate the natural process by which our scientific knowledge advances.

According to many people, the future of civilization on earth will______.
[A] be destroyed by ourselves because of the increasing problems we have had
[B] develop more rapidly with better understanding of the laws of nature
[C] be lonely because no evidence of civilizations elsewhere
[D] follow and exceed all the intelligent beings anywhere else