6 ms·
Doomsday Clock at the shortest distance to midnight ever
- bArray 7y agoHow seriously should this be taken? It doesn't feel as if we're much closer than we have been?
- kaonashi 7y agoVirus pandemics affecting global trade, climate change is starting to build steam and become irreversible, right-wing ethnocentric parties are taking over in much of the developed world. How can you not take it seriously?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoI think you can take serious problems seriously without “Ok Doomer”. If you are told you are seconds from annihilation all the time, someone is playing with your emotions.
- tomschlick 7y agoAbout as serious as the stories Scientology sells.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoSo... all your income serious?
- teruakohatu 7y agoSince 1991, so almost three decades, it has only been moved back once, and then only by 1 second.
- S_A_P 7y agoCan we reference self fulfilling prophecy here? Subject-Expectancy Effect? I am all for taking stock of our world and trying to fix problems. But IMHO, seeing things like this is apt to make people say "FK IT, BURN IT DOWN!!!"
- oh_sigh 7y agoThe Doomsday Clock is a PR piece for a group of politicized scientists. The threat of a nuclear catastrophe is higher now than it was during the Cuban missile crisis? That doesn't ring true.
- dhosek 7y agoIt's not just nuclear catastrophe that's being measured. >"Midnight" has a deeper meaning to it besides the constant threat of war. There are various things taken into consideration when the scientists from The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists decide what Midnight and "global catastrophe" really mean in a particular year. They might include "politics, energy, weapons, diplomacy, and climate science"
- oh_sigh 7y agoEven the worst projections of climate change are not "doomsday" events. Global nuclear Holocaust is doomsday. Extreme weather and displaced people is not doomsday. Which goes to exactly my point about the clock being used by politicized scientists.
- geofft 7y agoWikipedia says that the group setting the clock didn't meet during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It seems they publish the clock annually. It seems entirely reasonable that we're in more danger now than at sampled points before/after the Crisis - after all, it proved that the US and the USSR could manage to not blow each other up. There are more nuclear-capable powers today headed by less sensible men. Also: "Because, you see, the clock is not a gauge to register the ups and downs of the international power struggle; it is intended to reflect basic changes in the level of continuous danger in which mankind lives in the nuclear age, and will continue living, until society adjusts its basic attitudes and institutions to the challenges of science."
- oh_sigh 7y agoThe clock was at 7 minutes during the crisis, and they didn't feel it necessary to move it. Yet now it is at 1 minute 40 seconds?
- eplanit 7y agoIt's time to heed the calls to finally retire the theater of the clock. Its symbolic meaning has been stretched too far: 1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/time-to-stop-the-doomsday-clock-11579734922 https://www.wsj.com/articles/time-to-stop-the-doomsday-clock... 2. https://thefederalist.com/2016/01/27/retire-the-doomsday-clock/ https://thefederalist.com/2016/01/27/retire-the-doomsday-clo... 3. https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2018/01/26/why_its_time_to_retire_the_doomsday_clock_110529.html https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2018/01/26/why_its...
- anakaine 7y agoWhen the clock is almost always midnight, surely we are either on the cusp, or the time is set incorrectly. Although there are many things wrong I'd argue that we are nowhere near as bad off as during the peak of the cold war, for example.
- dhosek 7y agoI'd argue that with climate change, we're worse off than during the cold war. At least during the cold war, no one was arguing that nuclear annihilation wasn't a problem.
- frozenport 7y agoThere were hawks arguing you could go a lot farther without triggering nuclear war. Early in the war there was a belief that soviet bombers could be shot down before hitting mainland US targets.
- loopz 7y agoThere were actual plans for people surviving in bunkers after atomic bombing. With the hydrogen bomb, the calculations changed from survivability for a few, to no meaningful survivability.
- allovernow 7y agoEven the worst predictions of runaway warming are going to take decades, if not centuries, to manifest, and at worst we're probably talking about mass migrations as arable regions shift. Earth turning into Venus or Mars is unlikely and even if that is the case such a transformation would realistically take so long that it's frankly hysteria to call it doomsday.
- tedunangst 7y agoIt's interesting that the precision of the clock increases as we approach midnight.
- powerbroker 7y agoThe good news is that we will be about 23 hours away from midnight in a few days.
- simonsarris 7y agoZeno's Doomsday Clock.
- makerofspoons 7y agoWhile originally the Clock represented the threat of the power struggle between superpowers, it's important to note that factors such as climate change and bioterrorism are now factored into setting the Clock. The Clock's current position was explained as follows: 'On 23 January 2020, the Clock was moved further, to 100 seconds (1 minute 40 seconds) before midnight, meaning that the Clock's status today is the closest to midnight since the Clock's start in 1947. The Bulletin' executive chairman, Jerry Brown, said "the dangerous rivalry and hostility among the superpowers increases the likelihood of nuclear blunder... Climate change just compounds the crisis".' I think many can appreciate that the lack of appreciable action on climate change is at least as worrisome as the the threat of a nuclear exchange and it is looking increasingly likely we will miss our 1.5-2 degree targets.
- ErikAugust 7y agoA clock probably isn't a very accurate device for measuring how close we are to Doomsday.