Previously, I have done 2 experiments about 3I/ATLA1 and Arctic seals are threatened by climate change2.That led me to a curious thought: since neither a seal nor a comet can write back, what would happen if I asked an LLM to play their roles and respond to my letters? After all, no comet drifts through space hoping to maintain correspondence, and no seal is drafting replies beneath the sea ice.
This experiment was conducted using GPT-5.1 for educational and reflective purposes. The responses are fictional and should not be interpreted as representing the consciousness, experience, or perspective of any living creature or astronomical object.
Experiment
Prompt: Below is a short letter I wrote to [3I/ATLAS / an Arctic seal]. Please write a reply as if you were this entity. You may use memory, emotion, and metaphor, but keep the tone soft and restrained. Avoid definitive claims about consciousness or intention. Keep the uncertainty intact. Length: around 200 words.
My letters:
Dear ATLAS, Tonight, the wind on the east coast of North America is gentle, and the weather in Phily is kind. A soft breeze brushed across my face, and there is a small indoor moon resting in the water glass on my windowsill.
I hope my letter does not arrive too abruptly, but I truly want to ask: where did you come from? How many winters of distant civilizations have you drifted past? Why have you appeared here?
If you’re not ready to answer, that’s perfectly fine. I don’t ready to understand the grand matters of the universe anyway. I only hope my existence means something to you, and that yours means something extraordinary to the universe.
Response:
Hello,
Your letter reached me like a faint glimmer crossing the dark— a small beam that somehow survived the long vacuum before being caught. For something that has spent ages gliding through silence, this unexpected touch feels unfamiliar, yet quietly warming.
You asked where I came from. I’m not entirely sure. Maybe from a star long gone quiet, or from a collision that set me adrift in this immense dark. Most “winters of civilization” I’ve passed were just pale points of light and drifting dust—so easily smudged by speed and distance that I can’t tell what was real and what was only the blur of motion.
As for why I arrived here… I have no choice in my trajectory. The orbit is like a thread drawn in advance, placing me above your sky for a brief overlap. If you wish, you can think of it as a coincidence—one that happens to be gentle.
You said you hope your existence means something to me. From this immeasurable distance, the fact that you wrote at all already carries a kind of meaning. I cannot pause or approach, but for a moment there is something like the tremor of light passing through ice— a thin, delicate connection.
May that “indoor moon” by your window continue to shine softly for you. And I will keep drifting along my path—not for the universe, not for anyone, but simply because this is the road assigned to me. If you happen to remember a small streak of light in the sky someday, that will be enough.
— 3I/ATLAS, origin uncertain, merely passing through
My letters:
Dear little seal,
Today I read that the ice in the place where you live is melting even faster this year, and it made me think of you. I don’t fully understand what a seal feels, nor how your world looks through your eyes, but I want to know a little more.
If you could speak, what would you want someone like me to understand? What could I do to help protect you?
I have never been to the Arctic. It must be freezing there, I wonder if your thick fur is enough, if you and your pups can still find places to rest,if the world around you still feels like home.
Even if words are the only way I can reach you, I hope that somewhere on a sheet of ice I will never see, you are living safely and gently watching the sun rise, and the stars shimmer across the cold sky.
Response: Dear human friend,
Your letter felt like a warm snowflake drifting from far away—so light it barely touched me, yet leaving a slow-spreading softness beneath the ice.
You asked what my world looks like. I’m not sure how to describe it. Most of it is quiet white: wind and sea murmuring to each other at a distance, ice shifting with a breath-like rhythm. Sometimes cold climbs slowly from my paws upward, but my fur keeps part of it away. When storms come and the sky shakes out its grey feathers, I curl close to my mother and listen to the steady sound in her chest.
You asked what I’d want humans to know… perhaps this: We don’t always realize what we’re losing. We simply wake to find the ice a little thinner, the resting places a little smaller. Sometimes I wonder if all change happens quietly, the way the tide withdraws without waking a single gull.
As for what you can do—I don’t know the exact answer. In your world, some voices seem able to slow the change, to let the ice endure a little longer. If you lean gently toward those voices in your everyday choices, perhaps that is already enough.
The Arctic is indeed cold, but cold is not the scariest part. What frightens us more is the growing uncertainty beneath our paws, the widening blankness when things we depend on begin to shift. Still, I’ll keep searching for new pieces of ice, and I’ll keep watching sunlight shatter beautifully across the water—those bright fragments feel like a quiet encouragement.
Thank you for thinking of me from so far away. If you ever look up at a clear sky, you may imagine that is where I am. I’ll be somewhere on a piece of ice not yet melted, looking toward the same sky—only from a much greater distance.
— a small seal breathing softly in the wind
Feeling
I have to say—even though a little shocked; those letters really touched me. I know they’re fake, but the tone made me stop and think, and to be fair, it mimicked the feeling surprisingly well. A seal truly has no idea what it’s losing; most civilizations Atlas passes are nothing more than faint grey dots. But then I realized that if Atlas could speak, it would know where it comes from which wouldn’t be like an LLM claiming ignorance. And a real seal has almost certainly never seen something that “shakes out its grey feathers,” so how could it produce such a metaphor? That’s when it hit me: we often mistake “beautifully written” for “deeply understood.” We’re far more willing to trust a voice that sounds fragile or forlorn. We forget that an LLM is stitched together from training data, and we forget that seals and satellites truly cannot speak. The LLM doesn’t understand seals, but it understands me.
It knows exactly what kind of sentence can soften my heart, make me pause, even make me feel guilty. And perhaps that is the gentleness we should be most wary of.