Too far too fast?

As I wait for code to build and tests to run, I went to go read The Daily Illuminator over at Steve Jackson's web site, like I usually do, and they posted an interesting Illuminated Site of the Week.  The site is titled "Ghost Town" and it talks about where Chernobyl, a city named for wormwood, is today and it's current state.  Elena takes us through the ghost town on the back of the motorcycle, pointing out where it safe to go and where you will end up glowing in the dark afterward.  The images are profound and the words are insightful.  The preparations for the Labor Day parade, scheduled for the first of May, a parade that would never happen.  The park with a full view of reactor #4 and the rupture caused by the explosion in the early morning night.  The lives that were left behind because there was no time to collect anything more valuable than the lives of your loved ones.  The concrete and steel sarcophagus that built around reactor #4 to try and contain the damage.  How many people died from this accident?  No one knows, and I highly doubt anyone will be able to definitively figure that out any time in the near future.

When the Chernobyl accident happened, I was in the 7th grade in Aurora, Colorado, and I was vaguely aware of the world out side of the U.S., outside of the state, really.  When I learned of the accident in the days after it happened eighteen years ago, during the Cold War, I had no idea what the impact would be.  Frankly, I still don't.  All I knew, is that the unthinkable happened, but it didn't seem real.  There was no impact from half a world away.  This site has brought me closer to understanding what happened, closer to tragedy, closer to making what happened there real.

This begs the question, how far is too far?  How fast is too fast?  Are we prepared to deal with the ramifications of our rush to utililize our science?

To quote Ian Malcolm, from Speilberg's adaptation of Jurassic Park, "You were so preoccupied with whether you could, you didn't stop to think about whether you should!"