Slashdot Mirror
Doomsday Clock Could Move
Lasrick writes The ominous minute hand of the 'Doomsday Clock' has been fixed at 5 minutes to midnight for the past three years. But it could move tomorrow. The clock is a visual metaphor that was created nearly 70 years ago by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, whose Board of Governors boasts 18 Nobel laureates. Each year, the Bulletin's Science and Security Board assesses threats to humanity — with special attention to nuclear warheads and climate change — to decide whether the Doomsday Clock needs an adjustment. The event will be streamed live from the Bulletin's website at 11 am EST.
Scientists are finally of a consensus that yes, indeed, it is time to rock.
For all the use and meaning the clock has. The clock doesn't reflect the world state as much as it does their directors political aims of the moment.
Regarding violent death - we are in a lot better shape than in previous years. Amount of people dying in wars and conflicts is getting smaller and smaller. It is just that our information coverage of that is getting better and better.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
These days, environmental issues (be it global warming, overfishing, pollution, sweet water depletion, pick your one) seem to be a lot more dangerous to our civilization than wars. 50 years ago, there was a chance that huge mutual nuclear war will wipe humanity off the planet. This was what doomdays clock is about. Doomsday clock doesn't care if you have local war with million casualties. Million deaths yearly due to wars or eating McDonald food is not going to make any difference to humanity as whole. Making Earth Venus-like does, even if it happens in 400 years, but cannot be prevented.
Your numbers are scary? No.
Multiply your numbers by 10 or 100 or 1000. Scary, eh? Not that much.
Multiply them by a million. Now they're scary.
War has ALWAYS gone on. Never have we had wars with SO FEW casualties. Certainly never have we had wars with SUCH a small percentage of the population as casualties. Historically, wars have been known to obliterate 50% of the population of a country quite easily. Same for plagues, etc.
To say that a few thousand casualties is world-changing is - as sad as this is - wrong. It's not. On the grand scheme of things the world will not notice. And why? Because that scale of carnage happens EVERY DAY and is actually much better now than it ever was in modern history.
We now have wars where we have so few casualties on one side that we can NAME the individual soldiers. We can have a press article for each one that dies. That's really nothing, in the grand scheme of things.
Doomsday is about the end of the world. 7 billion lives or a significant fraction of that. Your numbers are in the 0.000001 range of that (I may have missed an extra zero) even if you add the "every day" that you did to cancer etc.).
Fact is, we've never lived so long, been so healthy, or had such few casualties of war. However, one bomb in the right place, one North Korean dictator who goes a little loopy and makes a mad order to his military, one cyber-attack too many, and you can easily be looking at a real, live, global war that humanity won't recover. Climate change is not about the granny that died in the hot summer last year, it's about literally MILLIONS of people being displaced or forced into starvation as the lands become hostile to agriculture.
In comparison, your numbers are bloody chicken-feed. And 18 Nobel Prize laureates recognise that and are looking at the bigger picture that everyone forgets.
Now, I'm not a massive climate-change-will-kill-the-planet believer, but even I recognise that we're talking entire orders of magnitude bigger problems than bombing some shacks in the Middle East back to dust, or even taking down a couple of skyscrapers. For every single person in 9/11 that died, think SEVERAL TENS OF THOUSANDS or even SEVERAL MILLION dying instead in the scenarios the doomsday clock is supposed to reflect.
This is the real problem. While you're sitting there worried about heart disease from your rich lifestyle, and cancer from living so damn long compared to even your parents/grandparents, these guys are looking at the numbers.
You are more likely to die in an asteroid collision than just about any other problem, statistically. It's scientific fact. What have we done about it? Bugger all. And everyone just says "Oh, but that'll never happen". It doesn't matter. If it does, it wipes out humanity. If climate change is as serious as some serious scientists claim, it wipes out humanity. If nuclear war ever starts again - EVER - and there's a single retaliation (in all nuclear devices ever deployed, there is no recorded nuclear retaliation in history), then it wipes out humanity.
By comparison, less people dying every day from war than they do from walking out into the road at the wrong moment is piddling about.
The talents and energies are ON the real problems, the ones that will matter, will be irreversible, will change life as you know it forever (modern war, thus far, has not changed life as you know it at all, really - except to give you technology to make it easier to sit at home and get heart trouble!) and that are being largely ignored and require a gimmick to get you to wake up, stop watching Fox News, and deal with a real issue facing humanity for once.
A serious question here, has the clock EVER been moved backwards? I mean, every time I hear about it, it's some PR stunt moving it forwards. But I've never seen a press conference where they joyously moved it back. It seems like at the end of the Cold War, it should have been moved WAY back. But I don't recall them ever doing it. And if this "clock" only moves in one direction and can never acknowledge progress, then it's a complete joke. It's like that annoying friend who can only think of things to bitch and moan about, even when he wins the lottery.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.