Doomsday Clock To Advance

Dik Zak writes "Many news sites are reporting that the magazine Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists intends to move the hands of the Doomsday Clock on Wednesday 17 January. The clock was started at seven minutes to midnight during the Cold War and has been moved forward or back at intervals, depending on the state of the world and the prospects for nuclear war. Midnight represents destruction by nuclear war. It is not revealed in which direction the hands of the clock will be moved, but it should be safe to assume that they will move closer to midnight: the magazine cites 'worsening nuclear [and] climate threats.' The clock stood at two minutes to midnight when both the United States and the Soviet Union tested nuclear weapons in 1953. The farthest away from midnight it ever got was 17 minutes, in 1991 when both superpowers signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. It currently stands at seven minutes to midnight."

Comments

Arbitrary?

[Rhesusmonkey]

Is there some equation by which this is determined or is this another abstact measure of FUD that we could just as easily set to "Red" as 7 till midnight?

Re:Arbitrary?

[Eivind]

You are absolutely correct.

The *length* of the meter is arbitrary. Same for the length of the second and most other basic units in the metric system.

What is, however, *not* arbitrary, and where the large win lies is in making the derived units straigthforward combinations of the basic units, and the different scale units factors of 10^x larger/smaller.

There's an exception for time. The larger units of time aren't 10^x larger than the smallest one. 60,60,24,7,365.24 is a mess. The latter can't be helped: There really *are* 365.24 (or thereabouts) days in a year. But we could've split the day a lot more sensibly than 24/60/60. For example we could have 10 seconds to the minute, 10 minutes to the hour, 10 hours to the day. That'd be kinda disruptive, but it would simplify some stuff further. So, a foot makes exactly as much sense as a basic unit of length as a meter. Agreed.

However, once we've set the basic units, the connections are extremely straigthforward:

If I travel 1 meter in 1 second I travel at 1m/s, if I used a second to get to this speed I accelerated at 1m/s^2. If I weigh 1kg, then this required a force of 1N. If this force 1N work over a distance of 1m, it does 1J of work. If that was done in 1s then the power was 1W. If this was provided by electricity, then that is for example 1V and 1A. 1A means 1C electrons pro 1s flows trough the conductor. Now you do that, using only imperial units. :-) How many hogheads *are* there to a fluid-oz anyway ?

Hyperbole?

[Gothmolly]

So you have 12 hours to work with, and you start off at 17 minutes to midnight? Seems like a case of hyperbole to me - in that scale, the world is ALWAYS about to blow up in a nuclear war, so it quickly loses its impact.

It's like holding the stupid "threat level" at yellow or orange for a long amount of time, eventually people accept it and begin to ignore it.

Re:Hyperbole?

[The One and Only]

It's kind of like illustrating the age of the planet as 12 hours and the appearence of humanity and civilization as the last minute/second whatever...

Except without any basis in mathematical fact or measured reality.

Re:Hyperbole?

[A beautiful mind]

Please note, that I used the word metaphore. In this, the clock is similar to a work of art, it has meaning. It calls attention to an important issue by using a metaphore and you're asking where is the mathematical fact or measured reality in it?

The problem it points to does have mathematical facts and is consistent with reality aka it exists. It is a mathematical facts that governments around the world have enough nukes that it can display all civilisation on earth and potentially wipe out the human race. It is a mathematical fact that more and more governments are capable of using nuclear weapons. It is part of reality that those who aquired nukes recently are not the sanest people around, like Kim Il - if we can believe the reports about the test they carried out which I'm not sure I do.

Re:Hyperbole?

[gsn]

That most people live their daily lives blissfully ignorant of the dangers of nuclear weapons is entirely irrelevant. I don't think most people have a sense of scale for what a nuclear weapon can do. Therefore, the risk of a nuclear war is meaningless to them. Worse, I've heard and met some people who believe it won't be any worse than a conventional war, and are quite happy saying nuke Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and while you are at it, N. Korea. Sure most people ignore risks and only react after something happens. The trouble with a doomsday scale nuclear war is there isn't an after. Perhaps if you kept that in mind it wouldn't lose so much of its impact.

Not Climate Threats directly

[Anonymous Coward]

new pressure from climate change for expanded civilian nuclear power that could increase proliferation risks.

These guys are not claiming doomsday from climate change.

And despite the increase of proliferation and individual threats, the global doomsday we legitimately feared in the 80's is long gone.

I think proliferation in the Middle East will bring some long needed maturity to those ridiculous tribal governments or be self-limiting. Bad for some cities, but not global conflict. India-Pakistan nukes may have even calmed that situation. Mutual destruction pacts might actually work.

Re:Not Climate Threats directly

[NeutronCowboy]

Mmhh.... let me rephrase that for clarity.

However, I can say without a doubt that there are plenty of people who do not have any of these characteristics, including many Americans.

There, better.

Yes, Kennedy and Khrushchev did very well not to go down the hardline path. But we won't get lucky every time.

Re:strike 12 already...

[HappySqurriel]

I don't know ...

Lately I've been looking into the history of man kind and it seems like at any point in time people were certain that the end of the world was only a generation or two away.

I think it is about time everyone started to ignore anyone who claimed the world was about to end and listened to more rational voices.

One Bomb is Not "Doomsday"

[timeOday]

A nuke or two going off in the US would be terrible. But let's be glad we don't face annihilation today like we did during the cold war. Think about it, at the time there was a real risk of humanity being set back a thousand years, or according to some theories even disappearing. Terrorism is nothing next to that. They have nothing like the numbers of weapons or delivery systems to do what we or the Russians could do. India and Pakistan doesn't have them, and N. Korea doesn't have them. People just aren't comfortable without a certain amount of upset, and they enlarge or shrink whatever troubles they face to fill that void.

Do the submitters even RTFA???

[laughingcoyote]

From the summary...

It is not revealed in which direction the hands of the clock will be moved...

From TFA...

The minute hand of the Doomsday Clock will be moved closer to midnight on January 17 (emphasis added).

Re:It's Time

[Atomic6]

You're forgetting about the people that either: believe their god will save them from destruction; or just plain don't care if they die. Terrorist and insane heads of states (Ahmadinejad?), for example.

Re:Hyperbole? Define "blow up the planet"

[Dilaudid]

Yes. Always the same shit from the environmentalists - "humans going to blow up the planet". Greenpeace actually said, in one of their 90s pamphlets "humans about to destroy all life on earth"... Idiots. We may be able to take care of small flightless birds, we may be pretty good at wiping out most of the fish stocks, but humans could never destroy life on earth.

It's kind of instructive to think what we would have to do - start with the hard to reach - we need to kill all the life around the "smokers" at the bottom of the ocean, at the same time as carpet bombing the earth with nukes - but you've really got to cook every square mile of the entire planet. That means raising the temperature above boiling point (there's life at temperatures everywhere up to there) for long enough to kill every spore, bacterium. The important thing to bear in mind is that to kill life you have to kill every single bacterium, because one bacterium can mutate. In short it's not going to happen, it's probably technically infeasible, and no one wants to do it (not even George Bush)

I like to think this sums up two things - one the horrible grandiosity of environmental pressure groups - starting with their assumption that humans are powerful enough to do something that is virtually impossible, then assuming that they are more important than the people that can do this, that they are only people who understand the big picture. The other is that they know fuck all about any actual science (i.e. physics, chemistry, microbiology), and they don't seem to care to learn more.

Real climate scientists I salute - they do something virtually impossible. Environmental politicians (for that is what Greenpeace, and this crowd are) are just republicans who found a different issue first. Look at Al Gore - when he's not trying to ban music with obscene lyrics (PMRC) he's saving the environment with glossy hollywood films. Bless.

I remember the 80s. This doomsday clock sucks.

[arcade]

I only remember the 80s.

I remember, vividly, how my parents thought me that it was a cold war between the US and the Soviet Union.

I remember the retorics. I remember the fear. I remember how I was told that we could be destroyed by nuclear weapons.

I remember MAD.

I was born in 1979.

People born just 5 or 6 years later than me - do not remember this. They have never experienced the cold war. They can't remember it. They can't even understand the doomsday clock, the fear, the MAD uncertainty.

I was 10 years old. I helped chop the Berlin wall down. Physically.

People, just 5 years younger than me - don't understand what it was all about. They don't remember. .. and I'm still young.

Now, this article is about the doomsday clock moving forward. From 17 minutes to midnight. Heh .. I don't have words for the stupidity. The world is relatively safe. The major disaster and major fear we have is from islamic terrorists sending a couple of planes into a building or two. A BUILDING OR TWO! THATS IT! Eighteen years ago we were afraid that New York as a whole would be anhilated in a few minutes. ALL of it. Not just a building or two on manhattan.

And these guys want to move the hands forward on a clock of global doom. Right.

It was right in the 80s. It's not right anymore. Move it backwards three or four hours, and it might be right. This way - it's just ridiculous.