I’m thinking more along the lines of “We would have plenty of power for our framistats, if those ignorant barbarians hadn’t neutralized all the power ‘dumps’ a thousand years ago…”
But plants are not mobile.
I believe one of the points of the OP idea was that these radiation cats would serve as a warning – people noticed that cats that went into a certain area turned green, and the stories & fables told them that such areas were dangerous and to be avoided.
With plants, the people would have had to go into those areas, and plant the plants, and water & fertilize them, and watch them grow (slowly, as plants do) and only then see that they turn the dangerous color*. That’s too late, the people have already been in the contaminated area, raising crops. So this wouldn’t work as an early-warning system.
*Also, what color would be the ‘dangerous color’? For cats, green would work, because there aren’t any naturally green cats (or any other furred animal). But not so for plants – humans grow nutritious, good-tasting plants that come in nearly all colors. There’s no color that stands out as unnatural and dangerous.
Triffids
Breed fast plants to deal with fast breeder plants waste.
Well, one could breed plants that prefer to grow around irradiated areas, or that if they happen to grow there, display features distinct from those they exhibit elsewhere – personally, I’m thinking tentacles and a taste for human flesh, but whatever works.
Now that’s just nicely done.
I think that sign is a great example of cultural bias leading someone to what they think will be universal understandable, but is far from it. I mean, the skull and crossbones is clearly rooted in our culture, and could easily have no meaning (or a very different meaning) to someone a thousand years from now.
I see that sign is saying that if you see a giant skull, you should run away from it. But only in bright daylight. Hey, those ray things are coming down from the sky. The only thing I know that’s in the sky is the sun. Why the makers of this “beware of giant skulls” sign depicted the sun as an odd three-pronged thing, I don’t know, but that’s all I can think of that it could represent.
One of the last things that might occur to me as the meaning of that sign is “there is danger beyond this sign”.
I’m not convinced at all. I read this sign as :
“This is my tomb. Flee, mere mortals, for the gods are watching you”
Translation : This place is full of riches. Let’s gather the tribe to dig it up.
I always have a problem with skull and bones being used as a warning. Outside the context of our culture, it seems to me the most obvious meaning is “tomb, cemetery”
The basic idea is that, on top of breeding cats, we’d have to ensure that “cats changing color means bad things!”) becomes so firmly rooted in our culture that it gets passed down through the generations, for thousands of years. One way to do this, I guess, would be to write lots of immortal ballads about how color-changing cats are portents of doom. Or something.
Or maybe we could find a way to get the idea ingrained in all the major religions of the world.
It seems very difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish this artificially.
Still, radiation cats are an interesting idea, and this is a really interesting problem.
Isn’t the colour of siamese cats somewhat temperature-sensitive? I seem to remember that their coats get darker in the cold.
Presumably it would be a trivial matter* to adapt the allele responsible for that to respond more quickly, and to ionising radiation, rather than heat. The only difficulty I see is in getting it to change to a distinctive enough colour that isn’t naturally found in cats.
- Not really.
I seriously doubt there is any way to unambiguously warn the future about the dangers we have created. Perhaps the builders of Stonehenge were *positive *that any future visitor would understand not to enter the circle.
Do radiation cats have 18 half-lives?
“Fear the daylight, for this is the domain of the Reverse Vampires!”
Breeding cats that change color when irradiated seems kind of difficult. Maybe we could just breed cats that die when irradiated; that sounds a lot easier, and if you see dead cats lying about, you know you should probably leave the area.
Oh wait, we already have those. And we don’t even have to cultivate any memes about polychromic felines; it’s already understood that when you see dead animals en masse, you’re probably someplace you don’t want to be.
… unless you can believe that the Gods are gifting you with prey that does not need to be chased (and is pre-cooked as well).
Ready Ashun cat iz watching u mut8.
I agree. It would be like the ancient Egyptians assuming everyone would be able to read hieroglyphics in 2,000 years.
I suspect that the unspoken thing in the process is that the waste will be buried VERY deep, and under concrete, etc… so that anyone with the ability to dig it up can probably decode the pictograms or language.
Sort of like if the ancient Egyptians had put something with atomic numbers and rates of decay, etc… in their hieroglyphs, and then buried it 10,000 feet deep, the 19th century egyptologists wouldn’t have known what it meant, but neither would they have been able to dig it up. We’d be able to dig it up today, but we’d be able to also read the warnings.