Opinion Express View on NASA cat videos: The future is cats

If and when human beings realise the long-cherished dream of becoming spacefarers, colonising other planets and star systems, they will need, besides food, water and oxygen, a recommended daily dose of cat videos. Is it in recognition of this that NASA chose a cat video to test the capacity of its Deep Space Optical Communications experiment? The project seeks to improve infrastructure for communication beyond the Earth’s orbit and the high-definition video of Taters, the orange tabby, streamed from 18.6 million miles away, takes it a step closer to its objective. Not too far into the future, one imagines, earthlings will be able to watch cat videos while taking a break from planting potatoes in Martian soil or plotting an escape from HAL 9000.

The spiritually inclined might suggest there is a karmic connection between cats and developments in communication technology. Consider the origin story of television: When early equipment was being tested in 1928, the first subject of the new broadcasting technology was a statue of Felix the Cat, a popular cartoon character of the silent film. Before that was The Boxing Cats, a video featuring two feline pugilists from a “cat circus”, made in 1894 to test the Kinetograph, an early movie camera invented by Thomas Edison.

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Closer to contemporary times, it has been argued that the near universal switch from Flash to HTML5 in 2015, which significantly improved the multimedia experience online, was prompted in part by the large and growing demand for cat videos. And, it was revealed in 2012 that in an early artificial intelligence breakthrough, computers at Google’s secretive X laboratory sifted through 10 million digital images and taught themselves how to recognise cats. The lesson, finally, is this: Whatever direction the future of humanity takes, the signpost showing the way will be a cat video.