Series and fiction egging people for adventure is not something new, but a sudden rise in tourism in Chernobyl has raised concerns. Two major tourism companies SoloEast Travel and CHERNOBYwel.com have reported an increase in tourism after HBO played series about the horrible incident happened back in 1986.
Pripyat was a small village with a population of 50,000 (mostly engaged with Chernobyl power plant). It was evacuated within hours after the explosion in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The place remained abandoned after decades of the blast and between far and few visitors would come to lure around for a while.
In May 2019, when HBO released a miniseries regarding the accident, 30% more tourist paid a visit to the barren land. Director of SoloEast travel Sergii Ivanchuk reported that as the trailer was out, the companies recorded around a 30% increase in bookings which further rise in next months. The amount of radiation there has been announced safe within prescribed rules.
The series in itself dragged attention over its content. Chernobyl miniseries was a mixture of historic and actual account and received a mixed response along with the highest rating on IMDB. The series resurrected some of the past debates like Russia Vs West or Truth Vs lies. It also questions the turning of a human-made catastrophe into an adventure park.
The debate over nuclear energy and its pros and cons is neither new nor fading with the passage of time. Along with empowering the human race it also leaves us vulnerable with the amount of energy that is beyond control. Chernobyl was the first nuclear disaster on planet earth but not the last. The series triggered the memory of Fukushima nuclear explosion of Japan occurred in 2011 and it also left the viewer wondering about US-Korea nuclear war threats.
Russian scientist Alexander Kardashev developed Kardashev scale of civilizations to gauge the potential of any civilization in the known or unknown universe. The scale had three levels of achievements enlisted as
- Type I civilization or planetary civilization—Civilization that can harness and control all the energy available on its own planet.
- A Type II civilization—also called a stellar civilization—able to control all energy of its own planet and planet’s parent star.
- A Type III civilization or galactic civilization—can control energy at the scale of its entire host galaxy.
Humans are at the brink of reaching Type I civilization. This makes us the most powerful and yet the most “at risk” race in the known universe. If we want to seize to exist, subtle precaution and tactfulness would be needed to handle this abundant amount of energy in war and peace.
