Ghost Mail Weekender

Happy Sunday Voornaam,

When five-year-old Howard Fielding pressed his tiny fingers into his dad’s strange new invention - a crinkly sheet of plastic dotted with soft, air-filled bumps - he wasn’t thinking about changing the world. He just wanted to know what it sounded like if he popped one.
Howard became the first human to discover what would soon become a global compulsion: recreational bubble popping. Entire generations would follow in his chubby-fingered footsteps, turning office boredom and unpacking anxiety into a satisfyingly noisy ritual.
But Bubble Wrap wasn’t invented for fun, or even for packaging. In 1957, Howard’s father (engineer Alfred Fielding) and his business partner (Swiss chemist Marc Chavannes) were aiming for something entirely different: trendy, textured wallpaper. Hoping to appeal to the ever-edgy Beat generation, they ran plastic shower curtains through a heat-sealing machine, expecting avant-garde brilliance. What they got instead looked like plastic acne. Still, it was weirdly compelling.
Rather than throw it out and pretend it never happened, Fielding and Chavannes doubled down. They branded the bubbly mishap as “Bubble Wrap” and, in 1960, launched Sealed Air Corp. to figure out what, exactly, it was useful for. The answer arrived a year later when IBM needed a way to ship its brand-new 1401 computer without turning it into a box of very expensive parts. Bubble Wrap turned out to be just the ticket.
The rest, as the packaging gods decreed, was history. Bubble Wrap not only revolutionised the shipping industry, it quietly underpinned the entire rise of eCommerce. Billions of products, from fragile electronics to regretful late-night purchases, now make their journeys swaddled in tiny pillows of trapped air. And it all started with a failed wallpaper idea and a five-year-old who couldn’t resist the urge to pop.
People are incredibly good at testing out ideas and finding new uses for things. But one thing we haven't gotten right is the protection of oceans, probably because of the classic joke that there are plenty of fish in the sea. As some have discovered in the dating context that this is usually applied to, that isn't always true. It's even less true in the natural world, with trawlers ripping up the sea floor and threatening the livelihoods of many communities, in addition to the species in the water of course. Thankfully, there's hope - as Dominique Olivier explains in her brilliant piece this week.
Read on for another example of human innovation in the form of how we warn ourselves 10,000 years in the future about nuclear waste, as well as Dominique's Fast Facts themed around more happy accidents.
Have a great day!

The Finance Ghost (follow on X) | Dominique Olivier (connect on LinkedIn)

The catch that's catching up with us

How to scare humans for 10,000 years

TL;DR: In the late 20th century, a group of scientists, artists, and semioticians came together to solve one of the weirdest communication problems in history: how do you warn people 10,000 years from now not to dig up something that could kill them?
Humanity is creating something that will outlive us by tens of thousands of years - long after our languages have faded, our cities have crumbled, and our tallest buildings have turned to dust. That something is nuclear waste: toxic, invisible, and dangerously radioactive for at least 10,000 years. Since we can’t launch it into the sun (too expensive) or wish it away (not how physics works), our current plan is to bury it deep underground in reinforced, heavily engineered repositories and then cross our collective fingers.
But that’s only half the problem. The real question we’re grappling with is how to warn people who might exist ten millennia from now not to dig it up.
This is not a hypothetical concern. Sooner or later, someone (or something) might come across these burial sites and wonder what lies beneath. And if there's one human trait that seems likely to survive whatever evolutionary curveballs the future throws at us, it's curiosity - the same force that drives people to open tombs, decode ancient texts, and press buttons labelled “DO NOT PRESS”.
Curiosity is what sent us to the moon, but it’s also what makes a sealed, ominous, heavily fortified site look suspiciously like buried treasure.
Enter Sandia National Laboratories. In 1993, they released a report with all the gravitas of a sci-fi worldbuilding guide crossed with a horror movie pitch deck. Since today's written languages are unlikely to survive in their current form for thousands of years, the research team knew they had to find a way of communicating beyond writing. Their solution to this niche problem was layered warnings at nuclear burial sites: scary sculptures, cryptic symbols, and multilingual doomsday messages. The idea was to create places so unnerving that even a future archaeologist with a machete and a robot dog would think twice before poking around.
Some of their proposed designs for so-called “hostile nuclear architecture” included:

Landscape of Thorns – a field of massive stone spikes sticking out at odd angles, like nature got angry and tried to impale itself.

Spike Field – even more spikes, bigger and more chaotic, because apparently the first one didn’t quite scream “run away”.

Menacing Earthworks – giant lightning-bolt-shaped mounds of earth, like the land itself had a meltdown and froze mid-scream.

Black Hole – not the space kind, but a giant, useless slab of black concrete designed to make the land look permanently broken and deeply cursed.

Rubble Landscape – just a big square of exploded rock, there to scream “SOMETHING BAD HAPPENED HERE”.

Forbidding Blocks – hundreds of house-sized black stones arranged in a maze of fake streets that lead nowhere, kind of like the world’s most ominous IKEA.

But the physical stuff was just one part of the plan. The real brain-melters came from thinkers trying to figure out how you communicate radioactive danger across millennia.
In the early 1980s, a German journal asked various experts: how do we make sure people 10,000 years from now get this message?
Linguist Thomas Sebeok proposed an elite cast of nuclear knowledge keepers who’d pass down warnings across generations via myths, rituals, and, presumably, very intense outfits. Think Vatican meets Fallout. Inspired by the Catholic church (who have managed to relay roughly the same story for more than 2,000 years), he dubbed these knowledge keepers “nuclear priests”.
Sci-fi writer Stanisław Lem imagined bioengineered flowers that only grow near waste sites and carry danger messages coded into their DNA. Nature, but make it radioactive.
French author Françoise Bastide and Italian semiotician Paolo Fabbri proposed genetically engineering cats that change colour near radiation. Humans would learn (through folklore or TikTok, probably) that when your kitty turns chartreuse, it’s time to move.
And so, buried deep in deserts and deeper still in obscure academic journals, lies one of humanity’s strangest collaborations: the attempt to warn people who don’t exist, in languages they won’t speak, about dangers they didn’t create. All we can hope is that they listen. Or, failing that, that they’re allergic to cats.
Or, most likely, that the internet still exists in some form by then, in which case we should be fine without making half our planet look like a scene from The Lord of the Rings or the setting of one of Ghost's Warhammer games.

Dominique's Fast Facts: More happy accidents

An assortment of facts that will only take you five minutes to read.

Researcher Harry Coover, who worked for Eastman Kodak, first attempted to use a type of clear glue to create plastic gun sights during World War II. The problem was that his glue became stuck to everything, including the moulds he was using. In 1951, Coover experimented with the glue yet again, this time to develop heat-resistant jet airplane canopies, becoming frustrated yet again by its uber stickiness. These experiments helped Coover to realize that the glue didn’t require any heat or pressure to bond two items together permanently, and thus, Super Glue was born.

After taking his dog for a walk in the woods one day, George De Mestral, a Swiss electrical engineer, noticed that cockleburs were sticking to his clothing and the dog’s fur. When he returned home he examined the burrs under a microscope, discovering they had small hooks that allowed them to easily attach to the loops found in fabric and fur. In 1955, after experimenting with many different materials, De Mestral determined that nylon was most suitable, and Velcro was born.

One of the most prescribed drugs in the world was originally developed to help treat angina, a heart condition that constricts the vessels that supply the heart with blood. During drug trials, the pill proved inefficient at preventing anginas, however, it did yield another result: an increased number of erections in male participants. Since then, Viagra has proven to be a goldmine invention for Pfizer.