Nuclear Waste and the Ray Cat Solution
It may not surprise you all that I, as a person who cares about and seriously thinks about the future, am a fan of carbon-free energy. This includes nuclear power.
But nuclear power comes with a well known drawback- nuclear waste, which can stay hazardous for a good 10,000 years.
For scale, 10,000 years is the upper estimate of when the first attempts at settled agriculture.
Trying to keep something dangerous from hurting people for that length of time calls for serious creativity. There's been a lot of memery around the infamous "This is not a place of honor" message trying to warn far-future humans. But, realistically, there's nothing we can write down that's for sure going to be interpretable 10,000 years in the future.
The precautions currently undertaken seem pretty good, to my inexpert eye, but the point is that this is an issue that’s been discussed for decades.
And nuclear waste isn’t really what I want to talk to you about today. What I want to talk about is human weirdness.
Because when normal problem-solving techniques seem to be exhausted, you can count on human beings to start getting weird with it. That’s what I love about us.
Back in 1984, philosophers Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri published a paper, in the German Scientific Journal of Semiotics, that proposed a real left turn of a solution for radioactive waste warning systems. They suggested creating a species of radiation detecting animal, that human beings would keep around. That’s part one. Part two included deliberately creating a culture of folklore, proverbs and myths around this animal that included a warning that if the animal reacted in the foretold way, everybody needs to flee town immediately, because that would indicate active deadly radiation.
They suggested "ray cats", that would change color when exposed to radiation, as a hypothetical example of this idea.
So you, a person 8,000 years in the future, notices that your cat has turned bright pink, remember the stories, and go and warn everyone else that there is danger here and everybody needs to leave. The podcast 99% Invisible did a more in-depth look at the ray cat solution and commissioned an ear worm of a song that I think will be stuck in my head for 10,000 years.
I am incredibly taken with this idea; not necessarily as a plan, but as a fantastic example of human problem solving.
Because I can follow this logic.
What have we kept consistent for 10,000 years? Not much. But we have kept our pets. In fact, we domesticated cats around 10,000 years ago (a blip compared to dogs's 30,000 years ago, but still pretty respectable). Our relationship to cats has outlasted countless civilizations, every language, every structure. We've passed down information for how to take care of the animals that that live alongside us even as empires rise and fall and languages morph and change and are forgotten.
It's a little bit brilliant.
But also this is an unhinged plan. For a number of reasons. Starting with the fact that we absolutely did not have the capacity to genetically engineer radiation-detecting color changing cats in 1983.
Here in 2024 we can’t either. But it’s not utterly out of the realm of possibility. When my wife was in college a good 20 years ago they worked with mice that had been genetically engineered to have neurotransmitters that glowed under the right conditions.
And I can find independent “DIY genehacking” labs as recently as 2018 talking about actually making ray cats. (Yes, I’m going to do a newsletter about these kinds of labs one of these months.)
Their interest stemmed less out of a fear of nuclear waste than as a means of introducing danger-detecting animals into our communities, and demonstrating the potential of genetic modification. (Notably they were working on nematodes, not actual cats yet, and I think the pandemic may have taken this particular group down since then.)
Do I think we need ray cats to protect us from radiation? No, not really. Do I want to include them in a book? Absolutely. Watch this space. I think I may have a use for them in book 3.
What ray cats really symbolize to me, as an author, is that people will get so much weirder with access to genetic modification than most stories make room for.
I know it’s sort of a given that if humans have access to brand new technology they will immediately try to find ways to use that technology for war and for sex.
There are tons of stories about humans using genetic modification for war. I don’t have an issue with that, it feels like accurate characterization. I assume there are tons of stories about humans using genetic modification for sex. I don’t spend as much time in that section of the bookstore, but it seems likely.
But there are just not enough stories in which humans look at this new technology and start trying to plug every crack in every dam with it, just to see what will happen. But that’s what we do! For better or for worse, when we have something new we will toss it at everything.
Even if you set aside things like Spider Goat (technically that tech is for war, but they’re also looking at medical applications) and restrict yourself strictly to human genetic modification, you still open up a whole wide realm of potential weirdness.
You’ve opened up a Pandora’s box bursting with human ambition, horniness, and creative expression. And particularly you’ve given people anxious enough to go to extremes a brand new way to do it.
Someone anxious about the climate change is going to come up with different modification goals than someone obsessed with religiously motivated perfectionism, who will have different goals to someone fearing violence, or someone just desperate to be cool and admired, or someone trying to be whatever they think is normal.
Writing my books, one of my key world building tenants is that if I give people genetic manipulation, I want to show them getting weird with it. Give me catgirls, sure, but also give me people who only have to eat once a week and are designed to run forever on next to nothing. Give me overpowered living weapons who have to eat constantly and require constant upkeep like a formula 1 race car. Give me people with body odor that smells like the top perfume of the decade when they got the work done. People who wanted to live underwater. Who wanted not to fear fire anymore. Show me attempts at immortality. Anything someone can fear, someone will try to fix by changing themself, or changing their children.
I want embodied attempts at handling all these different relatable pressures, and I want to depict it all with empathy.
And then I want to put them in a room together, to have opinions and feelings about all these different bodies, all these different priorities on display. Because I am living in a society that absolutely can not be normal about people’s bodies or their choices about those bodies.
That's so much more exciting to me than "what if there was a guy who could beat up all the other guys really good." or "what if humans went against the natural order and ruined their human nature".
This is our nature. Our nature is to make things and break things and try to solve problems and, above all, to get really, really weird at every opportunity.
Before I go, please let me remind you that I wrote you a whole novella to thank you for welcoming me into your inboxes every month, and you can read that right here. (Contains spoilers for Secondhand Origin Stories)
Also that Names in Their Blood, the second book in the Second Sentinel’s series after Secondhand Origin Stories, will be out in July!
And finally, due to Pride month, I have gone back to Bookfunnel for the month of June. You can check out a boat-load of free books and newsletters, starting June 1st, at this YA with Pride exchange, or this Trans and Nonbinary Fiction trade!
As always, you can view this email in web if you want to leave a comment or a question, or you can always just reply!
See you next month!
Lee Brontide
Thank you for joining me for another month of Shed Letters. If you know someone who you think would like to join us, please feel personally invited to share any of these emails, or send them an invitation to sign up here. And remember that Secondhand Origin Stories is available for free as an ebook here, or in paperback form from your local independent book shop or wherever books are sold.