Blog: You, us, everyone

🪐 When Planets Go Rogue (and AI Does Too)

— or, how to raise a generation that won’t get swallowed whole

A new cosmic mirror

Astronomers have just spotted a voracious young rogue planet called Cha 1107-7626, about 620 light-years from Earth. At just one to two million years old, it’s still in planetary kindergarten, but already devouring six billion tons of material per second.

This is no ordinary celestial object. It’s a free-floating planet, drifting without a star, growing like a baby star without ever becoming one. Astronomers are calling its feeding frenzy “extraordinary.”

And that, curiously, sounds a lot like another phenomenon much closer to home: Artificial Intelligence.

AI, too, is in its wild growth phase, hoovering up information, industries, and attention spans at speeds that make most of us dizzy. Data, content, workflows, regulations, university lectures, nothing seems safe from its gravitational pull.

Cha 1107-7626 may be the rogue planet of the cosmos. AI has become the rogue planet of the knowledge economy.

Welcome to the all-you-can-eat buffet of everything

Cha 1107-7626 is floating through space like an unsupervised teenager at an interstellar buffet. Gas? Dust? Proto-planets? Gone in seconds. Meanwhile, AI is sitting right next to it, casually inhaling textbooks, podcasts, legal codes, startup strategies, medical research, and half of Wikipedia before breakfast.

The result: our carefully built educational systems, designed to orbit stable stars (universities, textbooks, teachers, institutional wisdom), are suddenly spinning around something that doesn’t follow the rules.

Knowledge is no longer a thing you collect over time. It’s a thing you’re surrounded by, and often, overwhelmed by.

So the question isn’t “How do we teach more?”; It’s “How do we teach better in a universe where information behaves like a black hole with an appetite?”

Steering the starship when knowledge has its own gravity

Rogue planets eventually slow their growth. AI will too. But the in-between is where the story gets written? Ahhh…. By us!

If AI is the cosmic glutton, then education must be the starship: nimble, adaptive, curious, equipped with thrusters that help learners navigate gravity wells instead of being pulled helplessly into them.

This means:

• Teaching critical thinking, not just content.
• Building adaptable skills, not rigid curricula.
• Designing learning systems that orbit curiosity, not just credentials.
• Treating AI not as the enemy, but as the gravitational force to master.

Because the future doesn’t belong to the biggest planet or the hungriest machine.

🌟 It belongs to the navigators, the ones who learn to steer.

And that’s a story worth writing, before the rogue planet finishes lunch.