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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.
"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
Hence the inclusion of global warming as a criteria?
(ducks)
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?
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 ??
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.
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.
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'.