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Doomsday Clock Could Move

Posted by samzenpus on from the closer-to-midnight dept.

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.

16 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. I hope they move it by khallow · · Score: 3, Funny

    Who really wants to end the world in Chicago?

  2. Obviously... by Guy+From+V · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Scientists are finally of a consensus that yes, indeed, it is time to rock.

  3. Who they do not attempt to stay relevant? by Trachman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    One could understand and expect that intellectually stimulating discussions among 18 Noble prize laureates will yield to unspecified doomsday due to the climate change. Or, in reality, this became a free networking event with good food and interesting contacts, all under the guise of saving the humanity.

    Meanwhile, this year alone in violent death there were approx 2 thousands of casualties in Nigeria, approx 1 thousand of casualties in Ukraine and Iraq. There are real wars that are being waged at this time.

    In United States from cancer and cardiovascular diseases almost 4 thousands of Americans are dying every day. Not that the death is avoidable, but proper nutrition, exercise and lifestyle can prolong life by a decade for many.

    So what exactly is the purpose of ever-frozen clock showing the risk of super-fast destruction combined with super-slow climate change risk for some reason commingled and culminating to decision to keep 5 minutes to the noon.. So why exactly 18 Nobel prize laureates are gathering to decide if it is 6 minutes or 4 minutes to the end of the world.

    How about using talents and energies on real problems, identified using old fashioned scientific method called prioritization, in IT world knowing as function "sort".

    1. Re:Who they do not attempt to stay relevant? by abies · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Who they do not attempt to stay relevant? by Rei · · Score: 4, Funny

      If Earth becomes Venus-like then those with innovation and drive will innovate a way to protect themselves, while those that don't will eventally adapt, growing a hard, rocky skin and blood based on liquid metals rather than water. The climate has changed in Earth's past and life survived; if our future is to be a tribe of hideous rock monsters ruled by clever, pitiless human overlords in protective bubbles, then bring it on. It's not a reason to hinder economic growth.

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    3. Re:Who they do not attempt to stay relevant? by ledow · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Who they do not attempt to stay relevant? by Bongo · · Score: 2

      So why exactly 18 Nobel prize laureates are gathering to decide if it is 6 minutes or 4 minutes to the end of the world.

      If they can get it down to 3 minutes, everyone takes off their clothes and has sex.

    5. Re:Who they do not attempt to stay relevant? by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 2

      There seem to be two prevailing concepts how to progress further:

      ...followed by population numbers...

      Note that the best guesses by the experts say that we MIGHT hit 10 billion before world population declines to lower levels than now. Maybe. We won't hit 15 billion without some dramatic change, like suddenly all the birth-control methods in current use stop working.

      Do note that more than half the world is reproducing at lower than replacement rates, including USA, EU, China. Immigration is the only thing propping up US/EU population growth to current levels....

      --

      "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
  4. Might as well have the doomsday popomatic by Crashmarik · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Might as well have the doomsday popomatic by N!k0N · · Score: 2

      What the hell does that even mean? Does it mean we only have 5 minutes left to live? or fifty years? or an additional five thousand years? The claim isn't even falsifiable, since it's not anchored to any specific meaning whatsoever.

      "Midnight" = Imminent global thermonuclear war (or, these days "catastrophic climate change")
      "x Minutes to Midnight" = Indicator of how close international tensions are to breaking (or, "catastrophic climate change" -- however they define that).

      Thing is, I will agree that the clock's usage is pretty awful -- it's updated infrequently enough that it can only be considered as an indicator of the tensions for the few days before and after the actual update. For example, the Cuban Missile Crisis - arguably the closest humanity has come to total annihilation - was resolved in between updates to the clock, and as such did not effect a change to the clock in 1962.

    2. Re:Might as well have the doomsday popomatic by Ragica · · Score: 2

      Is there any evidence that any scientists on this board directly benefit from grants due to the clock or their statements surrounding their analysis related to the clock?

  5. Major Bummer Day Clock by retroworks · · Score: 2

    They could at least reduce the hyperbole. It would be pretty hard to doom the Earth without going through several decades that just suck, first.

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  6. World's Worst Clock by blogagog · · Score: 4, Funny

    That clock is worse than the one in Windows that tells you how long it will take to install something.

  7. Re:After moot retired from 4chan... by NotDrWho · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  8. Re:After moot retired from 4chan... by MachineShedFred · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yes, it has. I believe it was after the Berlin Wall came down and the USSR broke up.

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  9. Re:After moot retired from 4chan... by AC-x · · Score: 4, Informative

    It goes up and down all the time.