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Which, had it been around anything close to 60 years, could have been confusing!

The name comes from Latin "gemini" meaning "twins," referring to the mythological Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, sons of Leda. In mythology, Pollux was immortal, Castor mortal; their story is connected with themes of brotherhood and sacrifice.

Project Gemini was NASA's second human spaceflight program (1961-1966), preceding Apollo. It developed spaceflight techniques such as orbital rendezvous and docking, essential for the Moon landing.

Gemini is also a lightweight internet protocol and associated ecosystem (the Gemini Protocol), designed as a middle ground between Gopher and the modern web (HTTP/HTTPS), emphasizing simplicity and privacy.

It is also the name of Google's multimodal AI model, successor to Bard (announced 2023).

Google supposedly merged two of their AI teams, "DeepMind" and "Brain," and named the resulting team "Gemini" because it came from two things. Which is kind of weird as a metaphor because merging two things isn't really how twins work, but it does sound a lot better than "Google Reorg."

But it is connected to the Internet protocol of the same name, which uses 1965 as its well-known port number (although IANA has not heard about this yet).