“Don’t change color, kitty. Keep your color, kitty,” singer-songwriter Emperor X chants on the bouncy, hypnotic “10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories.” “Please, ‘cause if you do, or glow your luminescent eyes, we’re all gonna have to move.”
The podcast 99% Invisible commissioned the folk song as part of a story on nuclear waste storage design and the unique scientific—and anthropological—challenge of communicating the danger of radioactive waste to a future so unimaginably distant that its humans may not understand our symbols, signs, or language.
The song is based on a proposal from the Human Interference Task Force, a coalition formed in the early 1980s to research warning messages that could last tens of thousands of years. One of the task force’s suggestions was to genetically modify household pets to create “ray cats” that would change color in the presence of radiation. Along with the cats, scientists would create a mythology that color-shifting cats foretold danger. By introducing this idea into folktales, legends, arts, and culture, the theory held, they could embed an idea into human consciousness that might outlast our recognizable language.
The idea was always fantastical and never gained much traction. But I’m enthralled by its implications. Beyond the challenges of culture and language that come with transmitting a message ten thousand years into the future, I’m struck that we would even want to try.
If it seems at times to be a revolutionary idea that we should care about the humans around us today, do we have the imagination to love those who will be born into a world we cannot imagine?
In the early 20th century, Frank Plumpton Ramsey was a giant in the fields of philosophy, mathematics, and economics before dying of jaundice at the age of twenty-six. One of his revolutionary ideas was the concept of intergenerational welfare economics, which held that economic decisions intending to maximize utility should weight future generations’ well-being equally to that of our own. Not only was ignoring future generations “ethically indefensible,” a New Yorker profile notes him writing, it was evidence of “the weakness of the imagination.”
This idea of valuing future generations, of course, didn’t originate in the halls of Cambridge. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about the ancient indigenous principles of the Honorable Harvest, rules that ensure the world “is as rich for the seventh generation as it is for us.”
“Ask permission of the ones whose lives you seek. Abide by the answer,” she writes, summarizing the principles in her own words. “Take only that which is given to you. Share it, as the Earth has shared with you. Be grateful. Reciprocate the gift. Sustain the ones who sustain you, and the Earth will last forever.”
“Western economies and institutions enmesh us all in a profoundly dishonorable harvest,” Kimmerer writes. “Collectively, by assent or by inaction, we have chosen the policies we live by. We can choose again.”
If our imagination is wild enough and our compassion strong enough to invent radioactive kittens that will protect future generations, what other innovations might we create? How might we embed our values for this earth and its future in legend that will survive us? What are the rituals we hope to pass on? What myths? What prayers?
There is no inevitable future for humanity on this planet. The arc of the universe bends only because people have been bending it, drawing their calculations with an eye to the future. As the climate crisis looms and nuclear weapons proliferate, we must cultivate a profound sense of imagination and an even more profound love.
So take only what you need. Plant sequoias. Live as if you care about those people you will never live to meet, people with whom you may share as little as you’d share with Paleolithic cave painters. Love the lives that are to come in seven generations, in ten thousand years, and this, I think, will be your greatest proof of hope.
Katerina Parsons lives in Washington, D.C. where she works on international humanitarian assistance (views not of her employer). A graduate of Calvin University (2015) and American University (2022), she lived in Honduras for four years before moving back to the U.S. to work on policy and advocacy. She enjoys reading, dancing, and experimenting in her community garden plot.
That cat anecdote is a.maz.ing. Just don’t tell the animal rights activists…
More seriously, though, there’s a great chapter in Astra Taylor’s book “Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone” about the complexities of including past and future people in democratic decision-making. Apparently Jefferson wanted laws to expire after 19 years so a new generation could have a different say!
This post bespeaks your own generosity by giving us something meaningful to consider. We always talk of “the future,” but do we actually live for it, for others? In some ways, it’s hard to imagine, since we are self-focused individuals, but you are right to say we are called to more.
The Bible also has something similar to this, “The Year of Jubilee.” I’m not a hundred percent on the specifics, but they would basically let the fields rest from harvest, would abolish owed debts, and some other practices. It’s a concept that’s been floating around a long time. Maybe more consideration should be given it.