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Doomsday Clock Remains at Five Minutes to Midnight

Posted by Unknown on from the hands-that-threaten-doom dept.

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."

23 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. DOOOOOOOMED by i+kan+reed · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:DOOOOOOOMED by Kenja · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yup. It's like a less useful Homeland Security threat level color.

      --

      "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
    2. Re:DOOOOOOOMED by i+kan+reed · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I mean, a PR stunt that says "don't start a nuclear war, ya doffers" wasn't necessarily a bad idea back then, but its continuation as an "institution" really just ruins its credibility.

    3. Re:DOOOOOOOMED by CanHasDIY · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yup.

      At this point, it's no longer "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," and more "That geriatric motherfucker that won't stop calling about those kids on his lawn."

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    4. Re:DOOOOOOOMED by ISoldat53 · · Score: 4, Funny

      And you can't rhyme anything with it.

    5. Re:DOOOOOOOMED by i+kan+reed · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah, it's kinda silly to compare an environmental disaster that will moderately drop the potential carrying capacity of the planet to nuclear annihilation, as even being the same order of magnitude of danger. It makes climate change harder to take seriously, which is bad, because it's important(just not anywhere near as important as not starting a nuclear war).

    6. Re:DOOOOOOOMED by Tailhook · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The doomsday clock accumulates the new fears of western elites like some sort of alarmist meme flypaper.

      In truth, the doomsday clock represents exactly that set of things you should not worry about. The thing that will actually blow up our world will be deliberately excluded from the list because that thing will enjoy the highest degree of political immunization. Right up until it all goes pear shaped.

      --
      Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
    7. Re:DOOOOOOOMED by lennier · · Score: 4, Insightful

      the systematic "burning" of Cold War nuclear weapons as commercial fuel to light the very cities they once threatened.

      Admittedly WWIII would also have lit the cities extremely well... for a couple of microseconds.

      I think the generation who grew up after the 1980s don't really grasp just how intensely we 80s kids felt the shadow of nuclear war. You can't really understand 80s culture without that; it seeps into almost every part of art and culture from 1980-1989, especially New Wave music. Climate change and the War on Terror combined? They don't even begin to approach a fraction of the existential certainty of absolute destruction we felt. (Though we had both back then too; watch 1973's "Soylent Green" and you'll see global warming as part of the backdrop). And the relief at WWIII being postponed when the Wall fell... quickly turning to disgust as capitalism ate everything...

      "I wanted to run through the street yelling, to grab them all and say: 'Every day from this day on is a gift. Use it well!' Instead, I got drunk."

      That right there is everything you need to know about Generation X and why we feel so burned out on life. But, hey, alive after twenty, and not expecting to be, and every day we don't have a nuclear apocalypse is a good day. And every nuclear warhead destroyed and turned into toxic but not explosive nuclear fuel is a win.

      But the nukes are still there, and the missiles are being repurposed as 'conventional' warheads, and that's sure going to end well for all concerned. Before, identifying nuclear attack was easy: an unscheduled ICBM launch means you push the button. Under Prompt Global Strike, how do you tell if an incoming ICBM signature is a nuke warhead or a conventional warhead? You don't. You guess. That's.... nice.

      So, the Doomsday clock is still relevant and I for one am glad it's there. To remind us all of what once was, the shadow we lived under, and the shadow that still hasn't completely gone away.

      --
      You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
  2. wait wait wait.... by roc97007 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:wait wait wait.... by MachineShedFred · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Because, to some people, the method of someone being killed is more important than the fact they were killed to begin with. See: Syria's chemical weapon attacks last year.

      One hundred thousand people dead from bullets and explosives, Obama, the US Department of State, the collective foreign policies of Europe, and anyone else that isn't directly sharing a border with Syria could give a fuck. One hundred people dead from Sarin, OH BOY LET'S INVADE! LET'S SANCTION! BOMB THE FUCK OUT OF DAMASCUS!!

      Dead is dead. Outside of the moment someone dies, the method hardly matters.

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
    2. Re:wait wait wait.... by roc97007 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It depends how you define "killer robot" if you are thinking cylons then no but if you are thinking about something like UAVs loaded with weapons and ready for war with operators sitting comfortably miles away from any danger then yes killer robot.

      I'm not saying killer robots don't exist and aren't a concern. Even worse than your scenario, killer drones are on their way to being autonomous -- no operators at all. So yeah, that's a big concern. But until they become Von Neumann machines, they're not in and of themselves a probable direct cause of an extinction event.

      But I'm trying to be fair. Someone please explain to me how killer robots represent a potential extinction event. And not by causing a war. Wars have been caused by more trivial things. "Their king insulted our king" or a single assassination.

      In other words, does the doomsday clock actually represent significant threats to extinction events anymore, or just things that a group of scientists don't like? If the latter, it can safely be ignored.

      --
      Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
  3. Who cares? by Russ1642 · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Who cares? by 0123456 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Forgive my rudeness, but that appears to be a bit of a non-sequitur.

      Not to me. The 'Doomsday Clock' was invented as a means to push for nuclear disarmament; arguably a good idea, but unarguably a political agenda.

      Now we've eliminated the majority of nuclear weapons, it's become irrelevant, but, like all such things, they're unable to say 'job done, let's go home', and have to find a new mission. Hence it's now become about pushing 'carbon emission reduction' and eliminating drones.

      Which is why most of us just laugh at it.

  4. Re:North Korea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

  5. Inspiration by egcagrac0 · · Score: 5, Funny

    The doomsday clock is what inspires people to keep proclaiming this to be the year of Linux on the desktop.

  6. Location? by Rik+Sweeney · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  7. Re:North Korea by tripleevenfall · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Hence the inclusion of global warming as a criteria?

    (ducks)

  8. Never been more than 17 min away? by BringsApples · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  9. Re:any minute now is pretty accurate by i+kan+reed · · Score: 3

    So, if we're doomed in 5 minutes, what does 24 hours represent? What's the scaling factor? To me, it reads as false objectivity.

  10. Re:North Korea by Penguinisto · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?
  11. Re:North Korea by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 ??

  12. Obligatory Watchmen quote by jayveekay · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  13. Re:Yes. by 0123456 · · Score: 4, Informative

    You don't 'have enough nuclear weapons on hand to destroy the world'. That would take a fsckload more than we had even at the peak of the Cold War. That's why the anti-nukes had to invent 'nuclear winter' to make nukes seem scarier.

    A nuclear war with the current stockpiles would be a really bad day, but nothing even approaching 'destroying the world'.