Ray cat

The idea of ray cats has gained popular-culture notoriety, including inspiring a song that is meant to be optimally catchy so as to persist for 10,000 years.

A 2019 report by the Nuclear Energy Agency concluded that Bastide and Fabbri succeeded at their real goal, raising awareness about the difficulties of dealing with radioactive waste.

Thomas Sebeok, the linguist consulted by the Human Interference Task Force, proposed in a separate report the seeding and nurturing of a body of folklore around Yucca Mountain, with annual rituals to spread the stories forward—a so-called atomic priesthood.

[3] The proposal, which has been characterized as playful,[6] was discussed in 2014 in "Ten Thousand Years", an episode of the design podcast 99% Invisible about long-term nuclear waste storage,[9] part of a wave of attention the idea received.

[10] Reporter Matthew Kielty said:[11] 10,000 years from now, these songs or these stories may sound incomprehensible to us, but as long as they communicate this idea that it's not safe to be where the cats change colors, we will have done our job.

[10] In the 2015 documentary short "The Ray Cat Solution",[19] French filmmaker Benjamin Huguet interviewed Fabbri, as well as Kielty of 99% Invisible.

[10] Mattia Thibault and Gabriele Marino wrote in the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law in 2018 that the ray cat constituted a "possible soteriologic figure".

[10] A 2019 Nuclear Energy Agency report credited Kielty with reviving awareness in the almost-forgotten concept and cited the subsequent spread of the idea including "Don't Change Color, Kitty", "The Ray Cat Solution", and Bricobio's efforts.

Their proposal was perhaps less about engineering the actual Ray Cat, and more about creating a symbol meant to achieve maximal awareness and reflectivity about the existence of radioactive waste and the challenge of [records, knowledge, and memory] preservation in society.