Title text:
The family lore was that we've had it ever since it was ejected from a star-forming gas cloud, but it seems more likely that my great-grandparents probably just bought it while on vacation in the galactic thin disk.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3281/
A lot of stuff does that when we don't know the definitive beginning, though. Wouldn't it be annoying if we theorized Population I as the oldest stars, and then they discovered two more generations before it? Then we'd have, like, Population 0 and Population A-prime or some such nonsense (astrophysicists love nonsense like that). It'd be one of those things like the Three Grand Soups (which is a list of four soups), or the Five Mile River (a 24-mile long river), or the NCAA Big Ten (a group of 18 college teams), or the twenty-two wonders on the list of Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, or the country name for Tuvalu, which means "eight islands" (Tuvalu contains nine islands).
Like the Spanish Inquisition taught us, never proudly name something after a number. You'll just end up having to leave and come in again.
Three grand soups
Yes, that's what I'm referring to.
Which only makes sense if you view it as “nobody wants to change.”
We just “Star Wars’d” it. The first episode is episode 3, but it’s not the first in the storyline.
It would be tricky to change a designation after the fact. If you retroactively designated all "Population I" stars as "Population II", then from then on every time you read any scientific literature you'd have to figure out when it was written so you'd know what they meant by it, and for stuff written around the time of the transition you'd have to ask the authors what they meant directly, and--
Language is supposed to make communication easier. Ambiguity in terms inevitably does the opposite.