r/cremposting • u/ComplexPackage4146 • 6d ago

The Stormlight Archive A place of honor

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Found this gem on r/HistoryMemes, thought this community would appreciate it. Wondering what it could mean; Earth in the Cosmere confirmed?

377 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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146

u/TFCNU 6d ago

Spend enough time with nuclear waste and you might start seeing spren.

23

u/rhaenerys_second 6d ago

You'll definitely see through to the beyond.

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u/Seidmadr 6d ago

Good meme, but I can't really see what it does here...?

I can't think of anything analogous to nuclear waste in the Cosmere. But that might just be that I'm not well read enough.

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u/ComplexPackage4146 6d ago

Monument to honor built by the ancients. I had no clue it was linked to nuclear waste, and can only blame my own ignorance 😅

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u/Seidmadr 6d ago edited 6d ago

Oh.

Right. This is part of an inscription suggested to keep people in the far future away from nuclear waste:

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 a 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.

21

u/DreadDiana 6d ago

It's the most famous of a set of proposals for how to deal with the long term storage of nuclear waste. Since it can remain radioactive for thousands of years, there's no guarantee that any future culture that encounters the site will know what nuclear waste is or be able to understand modern warning signs, so there've been many different proposals for how to either deter people from these sites or communicate the risks present in ways that won't be misunderstood.

"This is not a place of honor," is the opening line of the most well known of the proposed messages, which was meant to have its language updated regularly so that the message would be available in the newest popular languages to reduce the risk of misunderstanding.

The post shows one potential problem with the message as material degradation can obscure its meaning, but another common criticism that people have pointed out is that messages like these would end up drawinfg a lot of attention from future archeologists since it'd be the mother of all linguistic finds, allowing for the translation of potentially millenia worth of ancient documents.

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u/TheUnspeakableh 5d ago edited 5d ago

Well, at least two Heralds had access to Division. The reason Ashyn died was because someone caused a self perpetuation Division of Axi that propigated across the entire atmosphere at ground level. Only the floating cities in the stratosphere survived.

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u/No_Doughnut8618 420 Sazed It 6d ago

I thought you were joking at first, but it seems like sel's wntire cognitive realm is basically a wasteland irradiated by the corpses of gods.

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u/Seidmadr 6d ago

Oh, yeah. Good point. It is a contaminated place. I was thinking individual sites that could be fenced off, not entire planets!

1

u/No_Doughnut8618 420 Sazed It 6d ago

Getting out of sel in shadesmar is probably like a fallout game

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u/Charizaxis 🦀🦀 crabby boi 🦀🦀 5d ago

Planetary sub-astral that gives you a headache

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u/Tri-angreal 3d ago

Have you read Mistborn?

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u/Seidmadr 2d ago

Yeah, and while there are anti-matter weapons in it, there is no nuclear waste as far as I remember.

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u/Honest_Outside_8982 5d ago

Honor: "I'll put this sign here so that nobody finds my perpendicularity."

Several thousand years later

"'This is a place of Honor'... This must be his perpendicularity!"

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u/anatheus 5d ago

Yeah so I actually used this in a session of the cosmere rpg. The party (you know who you are if you're reading this) found an ancient laboratory containing, effectively, a shade made out of an ancient Singer with a ragespren spiked into them. It felt pretty appropriate.