This Place Is Not a Place of Honor
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About
This Place Is Not a Place of Honor, otherwise known as Long-Time Nuclear Waste Warning Message or Radiation Warning Copypasta, is a message intended to warn future cultures about radioactive nuclear waste that will remain dangerous to humans for thousands of years. The message was written in 1992 and became a copypasta in the late 2010s with the simple and serious language of the message being used to comedic effect.
Origin
The original message referenced in the meme was written in April 1992 as part of a report for Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico,[1] which was an interdisciplinary study on how to protect people from the hazardous effects of nuclear waste for thousands of years, as cultures and languages changed but the radiation remained dangerous.
They proposed that nuclear waste sites be designed to communicate messages without language, but wrote the message as an example of what the design would communicate (excerpt shown below).
This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here…nothing valued is here.
This place is a message…and part of a system of messages…pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here…nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location…it increases towards a center…the center of danger is here…of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
In addition to the message, the authors of the Sandia report also provided multiple examples of pictographic warnings (seen below), which are occasionally associated with the meme.
The earliest recorded use of the message for comic effect was by Twitter[2] user steve_lieber, who tweeted "Working out pictorial message system to warn future visitors to Periscope Studio that 'This is not a place of honor,'" on May 23rd, 2012 (shown below).
Spread
In November 2014, the message gained attention after an article in Method Quarterly[3] by Sarah Zhang, which covered the message and other methods of warning future cultures about the danger of nuclear waste.
The message became gradually more widespread online in the late 2010s. On September 23rd, 2019, Tumblr[4] user exeggcute posted about a wall-hanging displaying the message. The post received over 11,000 notes over two years, and multiple variations of the wall hanging (seen below) are now available for sale.
On February 27th, 2020, the Tumblr[5] account nuclearwastewarnings made its first post. Inspired by exeggcute's post, the gimmick account writes the messages in various artistic Adobe Spark templates (examples seen below).
Throughout 2020 and 2021, as the meme became more widely known and used, it was noted by multiple people, including Twitter[6] user prophet_goddess (shown below), that the messages were now altered forever by becoming a meme.
Search Interest
External References
[1] UNT Digital Library – Expert judgment on markers to deter inadvertent human intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
[2] Twitter – steve_lieber
[3] Method Quarterly – The Cat Went Over Radioactive Mountain
[5] Tumblr – nuclearwastewarnings
[6] Twitter – prophet_goddess
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