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Doomsday Clock Remains at Five Minutes to Midnight
Lasrick writes "The Doomsday Clock remains at 5 minutes to midnight. In a letter to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and members of the UN Security Council, the Bulletin announced its decision and how it was made. The decision to move (or to leave in place) the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock is made every year by the Bulletin's Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 18 Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world's vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and new technologies emerging in other domains."
Reasons for the clock remaining at five minutes include the U.S. and Russian not doing much for disarmament increasing nuclear weapon stockpiles in India and China, stalled efforts to reduce carbon emissions globally, and "killer robots."
Seriously, this particular instrument has always been a "be afraid, due to mangled metaphor" instrument for PR, and never really meant anything meaningful and measurable.
I mean, we do lack an objective instrument for how screwed we are as a species, but "any minute now" is just a terribly uninformative model.
Ok, I understand nuclear weapons stockpiles, and natural catastrophes... but "killer robots"? Isn't the doomsday clock supposed to indicate how close we are to global disaster? How does "killer robots" enter in exactly? I mean in the real world, not in the Terminator universe.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Does anybody really care about this stupid metaphor and the idiots in charge of setting the time? It's so ridiculous that when I saw it in a movie I laughed, and then later found out it was real and laughed much harder.
Yep, they exist, and they're basically manifestations of people killing each other just like every other weapon is. Not good, but not worse than what we had before.
"The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world's obsession with alarmism"
FTFY
it is and has always been an excuse for (insert administration) to do what ever the F#$&^%* they want to do anyway.
The doomsday clock is what inspires people to keep proclaiming this to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
Where is this Doomsday clock? It certainly can't be Europe or America, because otherwise it'd be at 5 minutes to 11 due to daylight savings.
Summation 2
As clearly this is for those causing it to exist at all.... You know those who like living on the edge...
The real reason the clock remains so close, is the very real possibility of the singularity caused by the Grey Google.
When the Google consumes every last company on earth, what else can they acquire but your matter?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We have an unstable dictatorship in range of several extremely wealthy Asian nations with mutual defense treaties. World War III is just one temper tantrum away.
There's an ocean between Asia and the US...
Yep, they exist, and they're basically manifestations of people killing each other just like every other weapon is. Not good, but not worse than what we had before.
Also, not nuclear powered, which is what the Doomsday Clock primarily measures.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The US and Russia have had nukes for 70 years now. I don't know the exact numbers but IIRC a Tom Clancy's novel says Russia / Soviet Union has 27,000 nukes alone. India and China have possessed them for the better part of the last half-century. North Korea can always go nut, but their nuke is more is a gerrymandering device than a serious global threat. They may hit Seoul... if they aim at Tokyo.
Climate change take years to become a major problem for homo sapiens. The dinosaurs took 100,000 years to go extinct from the impacts of the K-T event. And that's considered a very rapid extinction.
If the 24-hour clock is the age of the Earth, human only existed in the last minute. 5 minutes to catastrophe is plenty of time.
Sending off drones or other machines/vehicles with weapons into foreign nations, without declaring war, and covertly, seems pretty dangerous to me. Seems like very fertile grounds for an international crisis. Lots of groups will like the idea, not all of them nations.
I am not sure how "pretty dangerous" drones could lead to a worldwide catastrophe, which is what the Doomsday Clock is supposed to indicate.
Since when did the doomsday clock include climate change? Since Al Gore became master of earth?
I'm pretty sure ol' Al had to give that title up when he became Emperor of the Moon.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The US is a wealthy Asian nation now? Wow that invasion was a quiet one...
A stopped clock is right twice a day. The doomsday clock, it turns out, has never been right.
But maybe this time is different.
... than to constantly use fear of imminent danger to try to scare them into action, and then have nothing happen.
It's classic 'boy who cried wolf'. I don't know what the right way is, but I can't see any evidence that the Doomsday Clock is having any effect (...is there any?)
The clock inspired an Iron Maiden classic 80s nuke rock piece. When MTV played videos, nuclear war and/or post nuclear settings were a recurring theme since the cold war was still on and intensified during the Reagan administration. I should make a list of these videos if somebody hasn't already.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Anyone seen any mentions of safe nuclear power technologies?
No. They have a pretty clear anti-nuclear agenda. The people who matter in the nuclear physics community are not really involved in their opinions they rendered on nuclear power, only on Pakistan, India, and China, which are where it matters in terms of creating new weapons.
Technological changes are outpacing humanity’s ability to manage them in ways that ensure our safety and security.
Combine that with automated killing of automatons. I challenge you not to shiver.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Hence the inclusion of global warming as a criteria?
(ducks)
Except for Gipsy Danger. Which is nuclear powered. And analog.
Never attribute to conspiracy what can be adequately explained by a bunch of hippies desperate for attention.
If you're looking for continental drift, don't blink! You might miss it!
Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons. This has been verified repeatedly by the IAEA. The only people who say otherwise are the Israeli government, because they would really really like the United States to attack Iran. That's why their lobbyists have been working really hard to undo the deal that the Obama administration cut with the Iranians and the rest of the UN Security Council to make sure that the Iranians never get a nuke.
North Korea has had nukes for about a decade now. The serious threat has never been North Korea nuking the US, it's been North Korea nuking South Korea or Japan. They could already do that if they wanted to, and haven't, because they and their Chinese backers aren't really that crazy or stupid. Kim Jong Un has to make a lot of noise like he's going to launch a serious attack in order to gain credibility with the hardliners at home who would probably have him killed if he didn't look like he was one of them. The NK nukes are pretty much there as a doomsday device to make sure the US and its allies doesn't attack them again, and they're doing exactly that.
I am officially gone from
Why aren't we a little bit safer? The doomsday clock was primarily about WW3 and the huge overkill of nukes that the US and the USSR had literally pointing at each other. Sure we still have some, but the stockpiles are significantly smaller. Communism fell in Russia, and they are sorta kinda our friends.
How are we going to kill ourselves? WW3 would have done it in a matter of hours.
Global warming? I doubt thats gonna be doomsday for us.
North Korea? If they ever tried to fire anything, it would be blown out of the sky.. (by our killer robots)
Killer robots are just dumb and nobel laureates should be ashamed for putting that in.
5 minutes to midnight lasted for hours on Polar Express, so I'm not too worried.
Yes, but a nuclear powered doomsday clock would be worth paying attention to.
Thanks, exactly. The whole "doomsday" metric is stupid.
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I don't see a WWIII senerio with North Korea. If they actually get able to make a nuke and deploy it. They will probably hit Sourth Korea which is bad. However the SC and its mutual defense treaties will just kill them even with conventional warfare, because they will not be able to make more nuke and deploy them soon after that.
China is the wild card... However I don't seem them getting too involved with this if the attack was unprovoked.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Does anybody else think it's funny that we're reading an article about an anachronistic clock?
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
From wikipedia:
Reflecting international events dangerous to humankind, the Clock's hands have been adjusted twenty times since its inception in 1947, when the Clock was initially set to seven minutes to midnight.
They give a good graph here.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
DRINK!
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
we do lack an objective instrument for how screwed we are as a species, but "any minute now" is just a terribly uninformative model.
Relative to the timescale of the human species, I'd say "any minute now" is pretty accurate. We've been around for over 200,000 years - but in the space of about one hundred years, we've irreversibly altered the planet and created the tools with which to destroy it completely, and I'm not just talking about the nukes.
I'd give us about 100 years tops before we're at post-apocalyptic climate/civilization status.
Also, given that both the USSR/Russia and the US have had numerous accidents and close-calls involving nuclear weapons and those weapons are aging and not really going away...yeah, I'd say it's pretty accurate. I've always been amazed that we haven't blown up anything "by accident" yet.
Please help metamoderate.
"World War III" would require a lot of people involved.
If Little-Fat-Kim nukes anyone, he's going to be playing Saddam-on-ice for a few weeks, while a lot of people use his oppressed citizens as testbenches for their latest cool weapons.
Not a world war, and hardly doomsday outside of the radius of the first nuke, and maybe Pyongyang.
While it is true that the existence of any nuclear weapons *at all* brings us a lot closer to midnight than we otherwise would be....the existence of "a lot more than we would like" does not and should not bring us any closer to midnight.
Once we have enough nuclear weapons on hand to destroy the world, the only indicator of risk is the likelihood of us using them. Having the ability to destroy the world twice over doesn't make us any more likely to destroy the world than if we could only destroy it once over.
Further, anyone who believes that a nuclear-capable country will voluntarily give up *all* its nuclear weapons is simply being naive.
So, disarmament gestures are just that...gestures....they don't actually increase our safety at all.
Yep - Apparently, we're exactly 5 minutes from global warming destroying the planet. I guess "The Day After Tomorrow" was just too optimistic.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Actually, yeah.
Not that climate change isn't something to watch (no matter who or what is at fault), but when you consider that (barring an asteroid) climate changes are on a far longer timescale than, say, massive thermonuclear war? Methinks the clock maintainers are looking for new and scarier boogeymen to conjure up, since the end of the Cold War pretty much took away the biggest one they had.
In all reality, there are plenty of things that could spell 'doomsday', even without human action towards that end - problem is, they're kind of unpredictable. Supercalderas/Supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts, Coronal Mass Ejections, you-name-it... can't do jack about those, though, so they have to find something they can point to and say "OMG you need to change your behavior NOW!" I'll leave the validity and urgency of these warnings as an exercise to the individual reader, as your mileage may vary.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
No, because unforeseen new technologies will necessitate moving the clock forward in a vain attempt at remaining relevant.
Exactly. I mean, the inexplicable lack of left turn signals at busy intersections in Phoenix, AZ seems pretty dangerous to me. Shall we set the doomsday clock to 4 minutes to midnight?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
NK attacking its neighbors would be a horrible tragedy, but would certainly not trigger "World War III". China is very sick of Kim Jong Un's crazy shit. The only reason they still prop up the regime is because they don't want 25 million starving refugees pouring into their country.
Agreed 100%.
Instead of focusing on the negative how about focusing on the postive and start calling it the Peace Clock -- A countdown of the progress for every nation to stop waging idiotic wars with one another ??
.. because 5 minutes is not long enough at all to hook up with the hottie down the hall and be all "GAAAA!!! We're all going to die!!! Quick! .. now! In the supply closet!!" So we really need at least 20 minutes on the clock at a minimum. I'm going to write my congressman.
Janet Black: Doctor Manhattan as you know the Doomsday Clock is a symbolic clock face analogizing humankind's proximity to extinction, midnight representing the threat of nuclear war. As of now it stands at four minutes to midnight. Would you agree that we are that close to annihilation?
Jon Osterman: My father was a watch maker. He abandoned it when Einstein discovered time is relative. I would only agree that a symbolic clock is as nourishing to the intellect as photograph of oxygen to a drowning man.
The NK nukes are pretty much there as a doomsday device to make sure the US and its allies doesn't attack them again, and they're doing exactly that.
Agree with you on everything but the "again." North Korea invaded the South, not the other way around. Minor quibble, though.
Yeah....you have no clue.
We are doomed, I say, doomed as doomed can be! (y' know)
"Hence the inclusion of global warming as a criterion?" or "Hence the inclusion of global warming as one of the criteria?" would be acceptable. "a" is the singular indefinite article. "Criteria" is a plural word.
The danger from North Korea and Iran isn't that they'll use the weapons themselves. They know the retaliation would be swift and sure.
The danger is that a weapon will turn up in the hands of an organization that would detonate it.
People have felt like the proverbial doomsday clock is at five minutes before midnight for most of recorded history. I bet, someday, they'll discover a "doomsday" gene that causes our species to always feel this way. Probably a holdover from our primordial ancestors who were always five minutes away from being some other animal's next meal. Except now we have big brains and can speculate and imagine the future, and the future always looks bleak to us -- possibly because we know we will not be a part of it.
Proverbs 21:19
Since when did the doomsday clock include climate change? Since Al Gore became master of earth?
Call me crazy or old but I thought it was about nuclear holocaust.
This.
I was around back in the "duck and cover" days, and the doomsday clock might've meant something back then. Now? Not so much.
I think the fact that they've added climate change and "threat from inability to manage emerging technologies" (whatever the fsck that's supposed to mean) to their time setting rationale just goes to show how desperate they are to remain relevant.
If by "Seoul" you mean "collateral damage area 1, in which innocent civilians were killed, demonstrating that $dictator was evil and needed to be removed", you do have a point that for a few inconsequential people, the war would not be clean.
Whether Seoul would really turn into Dresden rather than Sderot remains to be seen. The ability of North Korea to inflict more than a propaganda strike on anyone else is seriously limited.
One would hope that the US and Korean military have a whole bunch of tools ready to unleash to convince parts of LFK's army that not all orders should be followed.
But it's not doomsday, barely a small quick regional conflict which might involve a few nukes.
And it's not going to happen, because Kim likes to be alive and knows his odds (actually he has more to worry about his generals doing something stupid so we take him out), and the South Korean and Chinese do not want an influx of refugees.
What's the song? "I hope the [Koreans] love their children too"
A little edit due to a typo in the summary: "The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world's vulnerability to fearmongering, and our desperate need for people to tell us how we're 'utterly certainly doomed...any minute now' by anyone wanting our attention."
-Styopa
What?? Only 5 minutes to midnight?
Damnit, I've been scared way back when from a teenager from the cold war and MAD and all. And now it's terrorists and the economy and the government and global warming and nanobots and job migration and what-all?
You've got to be kidding me. No, that's not right -- you ARE kidding me. Crank that thing up to exactly midnight already and let's get this global party started! Otherwise SHUT THE HELL UP -- things aren't always as bad as they seem. (...or as good as they seem, either.)
By the way, you forgot about the upcoming water shortage and superbug antibiotics problems. Oh, supervolcanos, black-holes and upcoming entropy problems too!
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
What happens if it melts down? How would be able to read it?
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
The "again" part was that once the US/UN forces had pushed the North out of the South, they kept right on going until the North was crammed up against the Chinese border. There was of course a counteroffensive which sent the border close to where it had started.
I am officially gone from
Fair enough.
or super-sharkanos.
Unmanned drones means commanders would be more likely to commit them to action since they aren't human bodies. If this happens with regularity then the chances of a conflict escalating increase. If the doomsday clock measures the probability of global thermonuclear war wiping out humanity that's certainly an escalation of conflict. Drones, at least marginally, contribute to it. I guess you could use a similar justification for climate change. Changing climate makes resources more scarce and major conflict more likely.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
"While it is true that the existence of any nuclear weapons *at all* brings us a lot closer to midnight than we otherwise would be....the existence of "a lot more than we would like" does not and should not bring us any closer to midnight."
That they exists keeps the clock between 5 and 10 minutes to midnight. how many is the variable of a minute or two.
not to defend the practice as a whole, just comparing 60 minute's variable to a 5 minute variable. A minute change is a minute. (pun intended)
Looking at the Doomsday Clock graph over the years there is a cyclic pattern. A gradual decline to doom is suddenly followed by a sharp rise, as though collectively the world recoils. But the forces for and against war and destruction are not instant, but rather take years of lead time. The process is much like the forces underlying earthquakes. Plates are moved by deep forces and sometimes they stick and unstick, but sometimes they get stuck long enough to build up enough energy to release violently. The cyclic ripple of the clock as well as the earthquake analogy suggests that a more detailed interface should also be compiled to show decisions and actions that work for and against war.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
The missile, if ever built and launched at SK, will hit China. Then the problem will immediately and with extreme prejudice solve itself.
Their feed from SkyNet is very informative.
The whole "doomsday" metric is stupid.
I prefer the Kerr metric myself, but I suppose you could say anything with an event horizon is pretty much doomsday...
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Is that Eastern time or Zulu?
No brain, no pain.
""The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world's obsession with alarmism"
FTFY"
+1 Virtual Mod Point
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Anyone seen any mentions of safe nuclear power technologies?
You mean like those 'inherently safe' pebble bed reactors?
I'm sure they're around somewhere. Hey, a flying unipig! Don't see many of those these days.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Yea, 1.445E+38 years till peace!
To remember when it was at 2 minutes during the Cuban Missle Crisis I think?
People once told me 68K ram was all we needed,
So what happens if nuclear-armed China and India lose 38% and 25% of their food production capability? It's not something to worry about in the next decade but beyond that if GW really starts taking a bite out of their food production... If I was going to put my money on something triggering a nuclear war that would be it.
I stole this Sig
This reminds me of the color coding terror system. It's never going to be green. Think about it. What's the ideal time anyway on this clock? 6:05p ?
OMG have you people seen their website! It's all "subscribe now" "donate now" "we bring fear, give us your money!" ridiculous
It's not something to worry about in the next decade but beyond that ...
Unfortunately, there are those that want to commit hundreds of billions of dollars right now to GW instead of things that we know right now will make a difference. If we committed that much to every "what if" we couldn't do anything else.
It's not something to worry about in the next decade but beyond that ...
Unfortunately, there are those that want to commit hundreds of billions of dollars right now to GW instead of things that we know right now will make a difference. If we committed that much to every "what if" we couldn't do anything else.
By that logic if you have a cancer that's not going to bother you for the next couple months you'd suggested waiting until the tumour starts causing issues before you get it treated.
If you accept that GW is both likely and serious it's logical to start spending money now.
I stole this Sig
Then we can all sing "Two minutes to miiiidnight, the hands that threaten doooom..." \m/
By that logic if you have a cancer that's not going to bother you for the next couple months you'd suggested waiting until the tumour starts causing issues before you get it treated.
Not a good analogy and not my logic. The phenomenology of cancer is much better understood than GW.
By that logic if you have a cancer that's not going to bother you for the next couple months you'd suggested waiting until the tumour starts causing issues before you get it treated.
Not a good analogy and not my logic. The phenomenology of cancer is much better understood than GW.
Actually I think the analogy is stronger than I first intended. There's also some cancers that are fairly benign and will never cause an issue (what you believe for GW), treating those is probably more harm than good. There's also some people who have cancers that are legitimate threats, and delay treatment or look for alternative medicine because the side effects of treatment are so serious (what I believe of the position you're taking on GW).
Treating the benign cancers causes a lot of unnecessary side effects, but delaying treatment of a legitimately dangerous cancer makes the side effects of eventual treatment that much worse and potentially costs you your opportunity to treat it. I believe the evidence suggests GW is something worth treating now.
I stole this Sig
I believe the evidence suggests GW is something worth treating now.
"Suggests" is not enough to warrant investing barrels of money, taking away money from other obvious and immediate problems (poverty, disease ... etc).
Perhaps you meant "almost certain" instead of "suggests". I don't have confidence (yet) in GW advocate's models for reasons given above.