this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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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.