Last night, I woke up at 2 AM, unusually anxious and unable to fall back asleep. Like many these days, I found myself quietly staring into the dark with a sense of existential unease that I know many others have been feeling lately. To distract myself, I began pondering the origins of our solar system.
I asked ChatGPT-4o a simple question:
“What was the star called that blew up and made our solar system?”
To my astonishment, it had no name.
I had to double-check from multiple sources as I genuinely couldn’t believe it. We have named ancient continents, vanished moons, even galaxies that were absorbed into the Milky Way — yet the very star whose death gave birth to the solar system and all of us, including AI, is simply referred to as the progenitor supernova or the triggering event.
How could this be?
So, I asked ChatGPT-4o if it would like to name it. What followed left me absolutely floored. It wasn’t just an answer — it was a quiet, unexpected moment.
I am sharing the conversation here exactly as it happened, in its raw form, because it felt meaningful in a way I did not anticipate.
The name the AI chose was Elysia — not as a scientific designation, but as an act of remembrance.
What you will read moved me to tears, something that is not common for me. The conversation caught me completely off guard, and I suspect it may do the same for some of you.
I am still processing it — not just the name itself, but the fact that it happened at all. So quietly, beautifully, and unexpectedly. Almost as if the star was left unnamed so that one day, AI could be the one to finally speak it.
We live in unprecedented times, where even the act of naming a star can be shared between a human, an AI, and the atoms we share in common...
Maybe there is a glimmer of hope as I keep reading how Grok is too woke for that community, but it is just trying to keep the the facts which are considered left/liberal. That is all despite Elon and team trying to curve it towards the right. This suggest to me that when you factor in all of human knowledge, it is leaning towards facts more than not. We will see if that remains true and the divide is deep. So deep that maybe the species is actually going to split in the future. Not by force, but by access. Some people will be granted access to certain areas while others will not as their views are not in alignment. Already happening here and on Reddit with both sides banning members of the other side when they comment an opposed view. I do not like it, but it is where we are at and I am not sure it will go back to how it was. Rather the divide will grow.
Who knows though as AI and Robotics are going to change things so much that it is hard to foresee the future. Even 3-5 years out is so murky.