If your cat is changing color, STAY AWAY FROM THAT PLACE!

Who remembers what happened three thousand years ago?

Ah yes, time for a flashback to the good old days when the internet wasn't a thing, India was just recovering from the geopolitical problems caused by the Kurukshetra war, the Mycenean Civilization was just collapsing, and Rameses XI was still in his Egyptian diapers. 

Okay, let's stop there. If you actually had a flashback, please contact me, I would love an interview. 

But seriously, let's really consider that for a moment. I'm talking about just 1000 BC, and our knowledge of the time is really limited. What we DO know is extremely little, coming from verbal sources of knowledge put to a leaf after centuries of dilution, or from archeological finds of things we can't make sense of.

Knowledge is lost to time. Be it because of invading kings destroying the libraries, accidents in shipyards, or disasters that wipe out entire civilizations, or in today's world, data center failures or viruses on your PC, it happens. 

But culture? That's harder to get rid of. People are so protective of their cultures, they go to war for it very often. Just look at the Thirty Meter Telescope. Mauna Kea is a sacred place in the Hawaiian culture. And there are massive protests around in the state against the TMT, to protect their sacred land.

Global Warming. It's the crisis of today. To solve it, we need to reduce our carbon emissions. For that, we need to electrify as many things as we can. From the furnaces that warm our homes to the cars that take us around. To power these electric objects, we need clean and efficient energy.

Most people point to Nuclear energy being the best solution for this. A lot of energy is being generated, while no carbon emissions happen. But there's one problem with nuclear energy for which most people oppose it. No, it's not the millions of deaths that could happen if a reactor explodes. It's the nuclear waste left after we've generated. 

While the advantages and disadvantages of Nucleaer waste is a seperate discussion, which Dr Simon Clark has an excellent video talking about the same on his youtube channel. But we do have nuclear reactors already up and running around the world. It's been the case for a long time now. And they're producing nuclear waste which we need to figure out how to store and dispose of. 

The European Countries mostly dig extremely deep holes and bury them there, so that the radiation doesn't affect anyone on the surface. America just stores them in radiation-shielded containers. 

But the United States of America was considering a solution back in the 80s and 90s, and even laid down the groundwork for it.

Yucca Mountain was selected as the national Nuclear waste dump yard of the USA, as part of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act amendment of 1987 (Sometimes referred to as Screw Nevada Bill). In true American fashion, they tried to make a profit off it, by making a little county with a population of 0.

As you guessed, there's an issue with this approach. The area around Yucca Mountain would become radioactive for thousands of years, and dangerous to go. We don't even know what the world was like three thousand years back properly. How would we convey the message about the place being dangerous because of all the radiation to the people living ten or twenty thousand years from today?

Whatever languages we have today would have evolved to be unrecognizable. Whatever scripts we have will be lost, or un-understandable. Whatever knowledge we have stored on the internet, including this post, would probably be destroyed along with the Data Centers they're in. The cold war would be remembered as a battle between Mosk and Merk with spears of flame that reached around the world.

With such a depressing future ahead of us, how can we warn the generations to come about the radiation here, if there's no way to actually communicate with them? 

To address this exact same issue, The Human Interference Task Force was created by the US Department of Energy, and Bechtel Corp.  Five solutions were presented for this following a poll.

Thomas Sebeok, a linguist who was a member of the Bechtel working group. He suggested the idea of "Atomic Priesthood." A panel of experts whose members would be replaced by nominations of current members. The priesthood would spread the knowledge of these radioactive zones through the means of rituals and myths. The Catholic Church was able to convey its message for two thousand years with its organized structure of religion. There was no reason this would not have worked.

This issue had a couple of issues, however. 

1. Given that it essentially requires this priesthood to keep control of these lands, it could lead to many political issues. 
2. The system favors the idea of hierarchies. Creates power struggles which can lead to destabilization of the organization.
3. Like how the Protestants split from the Catholic Church, the message could be reinterpreted and split into independent parts. 

Stanisław Lem a Polish Sci-Fi author proposed artificial satellites beaming down the information down to the earth for millennia. Along with this, he described biologically encoding this knowledge in the DNA of "Atomic Flowers", which would grow only near these terminal storage sites.  Since we'd be accounting for changing languages, we'd have to encode this information in a mathematical sense.

Lam himself acknowledged an issue with this idea. If knowledge is lost, the people ten thousand years from now might not even know that the flowers have something called DNA, or even be able to decode all this.

Another issue is that, as cells replicate, they mutate. After a thousand years of mutation, it's highly likely that this message encoded in the DNA might be corrupted.

Vilmos Voigt from Eötvös-Loránd University (Budapest) suggested a set of warning signs in all known languages from around the world kept in a concentric circle around the storage location. When judged necessary, we can install newer signs around these in the newer languages, without removing the older signs. Not only would this allow us to understand older languages, serving as a new version of Rosetta Stone for one, and for another, its constantly updating nature would keep the message alive.

However, the idea has an issue. Things age. And unlike that wine bottle your dad's hiding from you, most things don't get better with age. Between rust and weathering, most of the signs wouldn't survive that long, And Logistically, it would be impossible to actually maintain such signs in the long run.

Physicist Emil Kowalski from Baden, Switzerland proposed that we make the place extremely complicated to get to. If the future generations want to get there, they'd need to have a lot of technical ability to be able to achieve that. This way, the probability of an unwanted breach would be extremely small.

The idea is simple. If you're big brain enough to drill that deep, you're going to be big brain enough to have radiation detectors, and know that radiation detector going beep means bad.

The issue with this idea is quite basic. How do we implement it in such a way that only those with "High Technical Ability" can reach it? Anyone with a big enough hammer or explosive can get through anything.  It's an extremely broad definition, which isn't exactly what we're looking for here.

French author Françoise Bastide and Italian semiotician Paolo Fabbri proposed genetically altering cats, so they would change their fur color when exposed to radiation. Since cats and dogs are popular pets, they'll be with us no matter what happens, and these radiation cats would continue breeding for ages to come along with us.

However, the message would need to keep alive through the collective culture of the species. Things such as modern folk tales, urban legends, myths, poetry, music, paintings, bedtime stories, and such. Once we ingrain such things in our culture, it would be extremely hard to get rid of, and the message would stay with us for tens of thousands of years. "If your cat is changing color, STAY AWAY!"

The issue with this idea is the enormous collective effort of humanity it would take to pull off. Given how divided our world is today, it would be extremely hard to convince others  But then again, if hundreds of thousands of our ancestors believed something, there must have been a reason for it. And here, the collective good of the world seems like a good enough reason.

The story of this original project was depicted in the 2016 documentary, "The Ray Cat Solution"

So, in the end, how do we share a message that would outlast a language?

We root the message to be in our culture. And cute cats that will stay at our side for posterity.

Hey! You read till the end of the post.

Well, it was fun discussing how to keep a message alive for the next ten thousand years. But that goes on the assumption that the world will be alive by then. This Earth Day, make a resolution to help with that and help our descendants see these color-changing cats. Do your part to combat this climate change, be it by not spending energy unnecessarily, or by avoiding plastics. Everybody has a part to play. Make sure to play yours.