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The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Introduces the Doomsday Dashboard
Lasrick writes You probably know the hand on the Doomsday Clock now rests at 3 minutes to midnight. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has launched a pretty cool little interactive Dashboard that lets you see data that the Bulletin's Science and Security Board considers when making the decision on the Clock's time each year. There are interactive graphs that show global nuclear arsenals, nuclear material security breaches, and how much weapons-grade plutonium and uranium is stored (and where). The climate change section features graphs of global sea level rise over time, Arctic sea ice minimums. atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and differences in global temperature. There's also a section for research on biosecurity and emerging technologies.
Sure, they added climate change to try to stay relevant when nuclear stockpiles plunged, but there are so many possible doomsdays they ignore entirely.
I see nothing about zombies on the site, for example.
Have you ever seen a movie where the bomb was defused with 3 minutes left on the clock. No-one will be interested until its in single digits of seconds to midnight.
Nullius in verba
it's an HOUR and 3 minutes until midnight.
So if the earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old and this clock is representing a day between creation and doomsday... Hmm, 1440 minutes in a day, 3 minutes till midnight... Carry the two...
We can expect the Earth to exist for another 9.5 million years!
Whew... I was about to panic.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
OK, if they want to guess how far we are from disaster caused by nuclear weapons, that's fine. But why co-mingle "climate change" - is this just a "we need funding" thing?
7 - Unknown.
I wonder how these come to happen.
"Captain Johnson! Where the fuck are the two tons of plutonium you left the base with!"
*shrugs* "No idea."
"WHAT!"
"NO IDEA. SIR!"
"Ok, that's better. Try to be more careful with the next plutonium truck. Shit ain't growing on trees, you know?"
Sorry, there must be another use of the term "doomsday dashboard" that I wasn't previously familiar with.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I grew up with the thought that global Nuclear war wasn't a question of "if" but "when" I spent a lot of my childhood lying in bed wondering when that next EBS "test" would be the for real deal or not
That used to scare the hell out of me when I was a kid too. Now that I'm ,ahem, middle-aged I've become somewhat jaded. I really hate to admit that I've become jaded (and middle aged). But you can only take so much before you either get desensitized to it, or become a basket case.
In my lifetime, we've been threatened by extinction due to nuclear war, biological war, "the neutron bomb", comet/asteroid impact, solar storms, the sun going nova, a nearby star going supernova, gravitational alignment of Jupiter, super volcanoes, AIDS, various plagues, global warming, impending ice-age, Y2K, the Mayan apocalypse, the Christian apocalypse, global economic collapse, hyper inflation, communism, socialism, Jihad, artificial intelligence, alien invaders, running out of oil, the collapse of earths magnetic field, etc and so on.
The one thing that never gets mentioned is our own human stupidity. That's probably what frightens me the most. On the day the Rosetta probe was the first man made object to orbit a comet, the biggest story in the news was whether Kim Kardashian's ass was Photoshopped or not.
I haven't done any research on the clock, but what little I could find on wiki doesn't give any relative meaning to the setting. If it's set to 23:57, what does 00:01 represent? It all seems awfully arbitrary and set to an alarmist tone since anything with only 3 minutes left must be urgent! If you are being arbitrary with the setting then you could calculate the same date to equate to 02:30,. but then no one would talk about it as if it had meaning.
And what's a minute? Since it's clearly not a minute. Or do the mean each of the 1440 minutes to represent .07% of a percentile and being at 11:57 means we're 99.79% likely to end this year?
For a group of "scientists" (and yes I put that in quotes cause I'm not seeing any science), this certainly seems more like marketing hype.
Someone please chime in if there's a real meaning to all of this.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
Nuclear weapons were a convenient boogeyman to wave around when you were a hippie in the 70's. "Oh, they're going to blow the world up unless we pour this goat's blood on the gate of the air force base!" Discounting the fact that making a nuclear bomb is really hard (Iran and North Korea have been trying for as long as I've been alive, despite the fact that the general concepts are simple enough for a teenager to grasp,) and making something to deliver it is also really hard. By the time you get done doing all that stuff, you may as well have just leveled a city with conventional weapons. We did a lot more to Japan with conventional weapons than we did with nuclear ones in WWII, by the way. But after all that, some very interesting politics come into play, which is why India and Pakistan haven't nuked each other. And you know, the longer a nuclear device sits, the less likely it is that it's going to work. Your nice pure plutonium core starts getting crapped up with hydrogen bubbles. And those things are already very finicky as Iran and North Korea are finding out.
So yeah, on a scale of things that are likely to kill you, nuclear war is simply not one of them. You're significantly more likely to be shot by a disgruntled co-worker or a road-raging jackass in a giant penis truck. His truck is very very big, his penis is very very small and he's angry! In fact if you asked 1000 random people if they worry more about dying in a nuclear war or to zombies, I'd be willing to bet most of them would say zombies. Which are fictional.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
BoAS has been crying that the world is in *imminent* danger of destruction since at least the 1970s. At a certain point, even they have to question their own credibility insisting that the sky will be falling 'any moment now'.
Look at their logo for the doomsday clock, for pete's sake: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... it implies there is no conceivable reading in which we're not in immediate, constant danger.
This is PRECISELY the sort of crap that has led to much of the public disregarding "science" as a thing that can speak to many issues in our daily life - the BoAS may be staffed by nominal scientists, but they're otherwise pretty much typical, naive, left-wing academics trying desperately to parlay their "sciency" credentials into credibility in foreign policy and geopolitics.
Would you read a periodical on Particle Physics written by Michelle Bachman, Henry Kissinger, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi? Maybe for the laughs, I admit.
Then why would anyone give any more credence to a political pamphlet published by scientists?
-Styopa