现在是公历2026年仲夏。
距离你回归星尘，已经过去整整30年。
这一个月时间我都在读你的书。我被深深地吸引，当我捧着书时，外面是繁茂的绿叶，还有挤进来的阳光。
在这一瞬间遮盖住我思绪的阳光，早在八分钟前就朝我奔来。
从一开始阅读你的作品，我就深刻感受到了与你的连接，很想给你写邮件表达我对你思想的赞美，对你精神世界的爱慕，对你文字世界里无垠浪漫的沉溺。
事实上，在读你的文字时，我常常有一种奇异的眩晕。
我看着你的主角在黑暗中捕捉跃动的频率，那一刻，现实与文本的边界消融了。
我发现我能精准预知她的下一句辩驳、下一个想法，甚至是她在面对浩瀚未知时，那种混杂恐惧与狂热的骄傲。连在地铁里捕捉无线电频率、空气压力的起伏都一样。怎么会有人跟我类似……坐地铁发呆时去听逆变器的频率高低？
我想，她就是我。
我涉渡深渊后，带回终局。
我见证了高于整个人类维度的神迹与真理，但当我返回时，手中却没有任何可供实证的物理证据。那个终其一生都在捍卫实证主义的科学家，最终不得不站在人类的法庭上，向世界索要一件她曾经最不屑一顾的东西——信任。
她就是我。我可以接受全世界的质问、嘲弄与不解，但我没办法背叛我曾经看到过的星辰。
我见过浩瀚，见过苍穹，虽然有时候我窥见的不过是自己的内心，但我乐意成为星辰。
我知道，我们都是星辰。
我陷在沙发里哭了很久。
在今天，这颗星球，我们面对的问题与你看到的类似，依然类似。
国家依然在战争，只是换了一个国家；人们依然在彼此撕裂，只是不再是你认识的那些名字；政治与权力并没有更迭，手段你万分熟悉。
只是随着技术和科技手段的演进，我们正在消解“现实”本身。
科技进步很快，文明却一头扎进地底。真理没有使人变得聪明，反而变得惶恐。
你曾用旅行者号的镜头深情凝视过那个暗淡蓝点。在那么遥远的地方，人耳早就听不到任何来自地球的无线电。
可实际上，这里嘈杂得近乎尖锐。我们把更多硅基芯片送入了轨道，以至于地球表面像一张蛛网，它连接起了全球所有人，随时共享悲欢，但同时，所有人也在这信息洪流中，变得前所未有的孤独和碎片化——人们狂热地连接，却鲜少共振。
真理是什么呢？
我始终对真理求知若渴，也记得你说“科学生于自由探索，且致力于自由探索：任何假设，无论多么离奇，它的价值高低都由自身决定。”
我感受到你的仁慈，还有爱。
“她致力于拆穿其他人的创世神话，却不知道她生活的核心亦是谎言；她一辈子都在研究宇宙，却忽略了其中最清晰的信息：宇宙的浩瀚，对于我们这种渺小的生物来说，只有用爱才能承受。”
我短暂接触了你看过的星空，那些场景始终挥之不去。
当人类试图去理解红移、核聚变和DNA的双螺旋时，我看到了浪漫的灵魂，看到诗意在客观世界中显现。宇宙通过创造我们，完成了它对自己长达百亿年的凝视。
“我们学会了用理性去平息怒意、沮丧和失望。最近才出现的全球普遍不公现象已经得到一定的缓解。可是在瞬息之间杀死数十亿人的武器面前，我们进步的速度真的够快吗？我们能否尽可能地散播理性？我们是否敢于直面战争的成因？”
理性的浪漫主义。
原本我对自己的评价就是这个词，也曾沾沾自喜我给自己创造了一个词，然后我在你的文字里看到了它。
感谢你带我走过宇宙的百亿年，穿越星辰，遁入黑洞无尽的深渊，再从遥远的恒星系里跃出，拨开猎户座绵密的星云，回到淡蓝色的一点。
经历百万年，从蜉蝣走到亚历山大图书馆，最终停在美苏竞赛的那段时光。
原来已经过去30年。
原来你离开这个世界几乎30年。
我有过惋惜，因为我们没能出生在同一个时代。但那些故事依旧如此让我触动，好像是指引，让我的信念又轻盈几分，于是惋惜消失了。
那种对生命的好奇、对真理的偏执、对常规思维的叛逆，在结构上是同构的，那在拓扑学里，我相信就是同一个几何体。
接触好像并不需要物理粒子之间的碰撞，只需要高维结构在低维投影，语言、文字、诗歌……中，有了同样的频率。
博士，如果你看到现在的世界，会有怎样的心情？
——
It is now midsummer of the Gregorian year 2026.
Exactly 30 years have passed since you returned to stardust.
I have been reading your books for the past month. I am deeply captivated; as I hold the book, outside are lush green leaves and sunlight squeezing its way in.
The sunlight that shrouds my thoughts at this very moment began its journey toward me eight minutes ago.
From the moment I began reading your work, I felt a profound connection with you. I deeply wished to write you an email to express my admiration for your thoughts, my love for your spiritual world, and my immersion in the boundless romance of your written universe.
In fact, while reading your words, I often experience a strange sense of vertigo.
I watch your protagonist capture leaping frequencies in the dark, and at that very moment, the boundary between reality and the text dissolves.
I find that I can precisely predict her next rebuttal, her next thought, and even her pride—a mix of fear and fanaticism—when facing the vast unknown. Even capturing radio frequencies and the fluctuations of air pressure in the subway is exactly the same. How could someone be so similar to me… listening to the pitch of the inverter frequencies while daydreaming on the subway?
I think she is me.
After wading through the abyss, I brought back the endgame.
I witnessed miracles and truths higher than the entire human dimension, yet upon my return, I held no physical evidence available for empirical proof. That scientist, who spent her entire life defending positivism, ultimately had to stand before a human tribunal, asking the world for the one thing she once disdained the most—trust.
She is me. I can accept the questioning, ridicule, and misunderstanding of the whole world, but I cannot betray the stars I once beheld.
I have seen the vastness, I have seen the cosmos. Although sometimes what I glimpsed was nothing more than my own heart, I am willing to become the stars.
I know that we are all star-stuff.
I sank into the sofa and cried for a long time.
Today, on this planet, the problems we face are similar to what you saw—they remain similar.
Nations are still at war, only the countries have changed; people are still tearing each other apart, only they are no longer the names you knew; politics and power have not evolved, and their methods remain intimately familiar to you.
Except that with the evolution of technology and technical means, we are dissolving “reality” itself.
Truth has not made people wiser; instead, it has made them terrified.
You once gazed affectionately at that pale blue dot through the lens of Voyager. From such an immense distance, the human ear has long been unable to hear any radio signals from Earth.
Yet in reality, it is noisy here to the point of being piercing—we have launched so many more silicon-based chips into orbit that the Earth’s surface resembles a spiderweb. It connects everyone across the globe, sharing joys and sorrows instantly, but at the same time, everyone has become unprecedentedly lonely and fragmented within this torrent of information.
What is truth?
I am always thirsting for truth, and I remember you saying, “Science is born of free inquiry and is committed to free inquiry: any hypothesis, no matter how bizarre, must be judged on its own merits.”
I feel your benevolence, and your love.
“She was dedicated to debunking the creation myths of others, unaware that the very core of her own life was a lie; she had spent her life studying the universe, yet overlooked its clearest message: the vastness of the universe, for small creatures such as we, is bearable only through love.”
I briefly touched the starry sky you once looked upon, and those scenes refuse to fade away.
When humanity attempts to understand redshift, nuclear fusion, and the double helix of DNA, I see a romantic soul; I see poetry manifesting in the objective world. By creating us, the universe completed its tens of billions of years of self-gazing.
“We have learned to use reason to soothe anger, frustration, and disappointment. The global, widespread injustices that emerged only recently have been mitigated to some extent. But in the face of weapons capable of killing billions of people in an instant, is the pace of our progress truly fast enough? Can we spread reason as widely as possible? Do we dare to directly confront the causes of war?”
Rational romanticism.
Originally, this was the phrase I used to describe myself, and I once took pride in believing I had invented a term for myself, only to see it later in your writing.
Thank you for taking me through the tens of billions of years of the universe, journeying across the stars, plunging into the endless abyss of black holes, then leaping out from distant stellar systems, parting the dense nebula of Orion, and returning to that pale blue dot.
Passing through millions of years, walking from mayflies to the Library of Alexandria, and finally stopping at that era of the US-Soviet space race.
So, thirty years have already passed.
So, you have been gone from this world for nearly thirty years.
I once felt regret because we were not born into the same era. Yet those stories still touch me so deeply, acting like a guiding light that makes my conviction a little lighter, and so the regret vanished.
This curiosity about life, this obsession with truth, and this rebellion against conventional thinking are structurally isomorphic; in topology, I believe they represent the exact same geometric body.
Contact, it seems, does not require the collision of physical particles; it only requires a high-dimensional structure to project into low dimensions, finding the exact same frequency within language, words, and poetry…
Doctor, if you could see the world as it is now, how would you feel?