Doomsday Clock Panel To Set Risk of Global Catastrophe (theguardian.com) 86
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to unveil its measure of how close human civilisation is to the edge of extinction. From a report: On 24 October 1962, an American nuclear chemist, Harrison Brown, started to pen a guest editorial for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just as the Cuban missile crisis reached its climax. "I am writing on a plane en route from Los Angeles to Washington and for all I know this editorial ... may never be published," Brown said. "Never in history have people and nations been so close to death and destruction on such a vast scale. Midnight is upon us." With this dire warning, he was referring to the Doomsday Clock, which has been the Bulletin's iconic motif since it was founded 75 years ago by Albert Einstein and some of the University of Chicago scientists from the Manhattan Project. Their work had contributed to making the atomic bomb, but many of them had been outraged when the US used it against Japanese cities.
The image of the clock ticking away to midnight was intended to convey the sense of urgent peril, which Brown felt so viscerally on that 1962 flight to Washington. "He thought the world could end while he was on that flight," said Rachel Bronson, the Bulletin's current president. On Thursday, the Doomsday Clock will be unveiled for the 75th time, and we will find out what way the Bulletin's panel of scientists and security experts will move the minute hand. For the past two years it has been stuck at 100 seconds to midnight. With Russia poised to attack Ukraine, it is hard to imagine the clock being set back, and that means that the experts assess we are in greater danger now than ever. The closest the clock came at the height of the cold war was two minutes to midnight in 1953 after the first detonation of a thermonuclear warhead, a hydrogen bomb. By the time of the Cuban missile crisis, the hands were at seven minutes to, but despite Brown's apocalyptic editorial, the Bulletin decided not to move them forward because the shock of near catastrophe had given Washington and Moscow fresh incentive to work towards risk reduction and arms control.
The image of the clock ticking away to midnight was intended to convey the sense of urgent peril, which Brown felt so viscerally on that 1962 flight to Washington. "He thought the world could end while he was on that flight," said Rachel Bronson, the Bulletin's current president. On Thursday, the Doomsday Clock will be unveiled for the 75th time, and we will find out what way the Bulletin's panel of scientists and security experts will move the minute hand. For the past two years it has been stuck at 100 seconds to midnight. With Russia poised to attack Ukraine, it is hard to imagine the clock being set back, and that means that the experts assess we are in greater danger now than ever. The closest the clock came at the height of the cold war was two minutes to midnight in 1953 after the first detonation of a thermonuclear warhead, a hydrogen bomb. By the time of the Cuban missile crisis, the hands were at seven minutes to, but despite Brown's apocalyptic editorial, the Bulletin decided not to move them forward because the shock of near catastrophe had given Washington and Moscow fresh incentive to work towards risk reduction and arms control.
Aha! (Score:2, Insightful)
The FUD Clock! Give us a bunch of money and all your freedom... OR ELSE!!!
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You can, of course, show dollar and cent amounts paid to the scientists for showing this clock, right? And you can also show that having an awareness of risk reduces freedom? No? Then, yes, there is FUD alright. By those who despise scientists showing risk levels.
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And yet Einstein was involved in this. But Einstein was good at talking to the masses. You present a bunch of numbers and formulas to the press about how dire the race to nuclear destruction is and the population will ignore you as a bunch of eggheads. But show that you're only a few seconds away on a clock and now everyone understands the gravity of the situation better even if they don't know the math.
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Yeah, not so much. I never really got it myself - my clocks all just keep right on ticking after midnight. Not one of them just stops there.
Plus, if you do know the math, it doesn't make much sense either - 99.5% of the way to ending the world. And it's been the same 99.5%, plus or minus a tad, for decades.
Seeing a car driving on two wheels looks dangerous when you first see it. Seeing that car drive that way all the way around a race track? Now you know it isn't.
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No, it does not represent 99.5% of the way to ending the world. It represents a risk level, not an attainment level. Christ on a pancake, you'd expect the cynics to have mastered this much.
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> Inevitably the clock will always march closer to midnight
I guess. As long as you don't count the seven times [wikipedia.org] it marched away from midnight, that is.
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The clock doesn't mark attainment, it marks risk. As the risk drops, the clock moves back. As the risk increases, the clock moves forward.
As for the risk relative to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the nuclear bomber pilot I spoke to claimed that the CMC wasn't as dramatic as is usually portrayed. The accuracy of this claim is impossible for me to verify, so it is merely a claim, but then the same is true of the claims of all the other armchair experts on the CMC. They're all working from a limited subset of info
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You're right, how could anyone possibly think there's FUD involved with anything our betters in science decided to name the "Doomsday Clock". Now please show us the empirical formulas they use to determine how much time is left. There is rigor and results that can be replicated in their "Doomsday Clock", right?
Or are they just making shit up based on their whims of the day to push a political agenda?
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Have you visited their site to find the nyumbers yet? Or did you just read the summary, and a remote possibility of having read the article by a journalist?
Also, is "let's try to stay alive" is possibly a political agenda to some people but calling it that misses the point.
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No, they do not worry about climate change caused by cows. Honestly, is that the best you can do? Climate change due to atmospheric change has been studied in depth for just over a century and you're fixated on the one thing climate scientists couldn't care less about? Wow.
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I've been disconcerted about this trend to trreating scientists like politicians or social influencers or whatnot. It is a huge erosion in trust or science itself, even basic science, and it's all irrational. Well, humans are irrational but we do have a trend to self awareness and realising we need to be better than dumb animals.
The big thing there is that often you treat a politician this way - where does the money come from, what does he get out of this, what isn't he telling us? And that's because wit
Re:Aha! (Score:5, Interesting)
The Doomsday Clock was an attempt to communicate risk [wikipedia.org] to people who are intellectually incapable of grasping anything involving probabilities. It's like explaining General Relativity in terms of rubber sheets and weighted balls to someone with a high school level of math. You create a fairy tale that the uneducated can grasp because it contains things they can picture in their mind's eye. If they can't understand probabilities and statistical dispersion, you have to have explain risk in terms of certainties and hard deadlines.
You can't complain a metaphor is inaccurate when it was obviously never intended to be *literally* true. It's like complaining that space isn't actually made of rubber.
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The fairy tale seems to stick around with a lot of friction when trying to dislodge itl I see a lot of people, even highly educated ones, refusing to unlearn what they learned about science in grade school. I was taught at that the atom was the smallest particle that things can be broken down into - and this was in the 70s when the general public already know that the atom could be split and most college level students knew that even electrons broke down into smaller quantum stuff.
But today, you talk abou
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The Doomsday Clock was an attempt to communicate risk [wikipedia.org] to people who are intellectually incapable of grasping anything involving probabilities. It's like explaining General Relativity in terms of rubber sheets and weighted balls to someone with a high school level of math. You create a fairy tale that the uneducated can grasp because it contains things they can picture in their mind's eye. If they can't understand probabilities and statistical dispersion, you have to have explain risk in terms of certainties and hard deadlines.
You can't complain a metaphor is inaccurate when it was obviously never intended to be *literally* true. It's like complaining that space isn't actually made of rubber.
To hell with those pesky "uneducated" simpletons who can't understand General Relatively or Schrodinger's Equations. What do their opinions on anything matter anyway? Clearly, they just aren't as wise as you are in being able to interpret the clock metaphor.
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Tensor calculus is not something the average citizen needs to know, but basic descriptive statistics, fundamental probability, and how to make reasonable informal statistical inferences are things everyone *does* need to understand.
Enough already (Score:5, Insightful)
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I have to agree. It's rough largely agreeing with their concerns, but the imagery of being no more than 17 minutes from doom for the last 75 years makes it an easy target for critics to claim being overly dramatic. A clock that has moved between 17 minutes to 100 seconds (sometimes forward, sometimes backward) to midnight over 75 years makes it seem a bit laughable, and doesn't feel credible after decades of it trying to scare people.
Again, they are expressing valid concerns, but their choice of metaphor d
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Where does it scare people? Why would knowing an estimate of risk be scary? The land of the brave would not seem to be very, if a clock frightens them.
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If you really don't understand why people would find a "doomsday clock" to be scary, then you miss the point of the doomsday clock altogether. The point is to scare people away from confrontation and toward peaceful relations.
"Land of the brave" insult aside, there are many circumstances where knowing estimate of risk can be scary. If someone told me that my risk of dying upon leaving my house today was 99%, I would certainly be scared to leave my house.
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That doesn't seem rational. If you had good reason to think that there as a 99% chance of dying upon leaving your house, I rather suspect you would consider the risks and benefits, and calmly - not fearfully - adjust your plans accordingly. Fearful reactions aren't common, in my experience. When people experience high risk situations, they tend to disassociate from their emotions.
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People aren't rational. Further, it depends not on what you do but what everyone collectively does. You can personally amend your ways, but if a critical mass of people ignore it, then you have not addressed the risk.
To the end of 'that doesn't seem rational', it's also not rational to model the cataclysmic threat in units of 'minutes to midnight' on a 'doomsday clock', the imagery is designed to incite fear in hopes of modifying behavior to avoid the bad consequence. A purely rational approach would be st
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Maybe this is semantics, but there's a difference between acting out of fear and panicking. If I know there's a 99% chance of dying if I go outside, I can still rationally and calmly decide not to go outside for fear of dying. The fear of dying is why I'm staying inside, but I'm not panicking about it. (Although, let's be honest, I'd probably be panicking a *bit* if all of the sudden one day there was a 99% chance of dying if I went outside - I mean, wtf is out there, and how long before it can figure ou
Re:Enough already (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem as I see it is that there's a very steep but narrow potential pushing us away from doomsday. There's no negative incentive to stay away from the brink of doomsday. The world can sit at 10 milliseconds from doomsday for centuries and the average human may live a perfectly happy life. Meanwhile people in the 1300's had a terrible life but we were likely many hours or more away from midnight on the doomsday clock. Advancing technologies both improve quality of life and take us closer to doomsday, so being far from doomsday means having little technological capability and lower quality of life.
I would like to know what would be required to back us way off on this clock. How far does eliminating nukes and chemical and biological weapons get us? What about eliminating social media that sows division and hate? What about eliminating interconnectivity that allow misinformation to spread like wildfire? By human nature there will always be someone that wants to use new technology for nefarious purposes, so it's near impossible to have the positive without the negative. A doomsday clock like this only focuses on the negative.
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Sure, just as soon as you pay /. more than the Guardian does.
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They're an excellent newspaper, for the most part. It has minimal left-wing bias, but has been happy to print op-eds by Thatcherites and Reaganites, showing a level of impartiality that, say, Fox News never had.
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It's good old-fashioned newspaper business. The right frequency of controversial op-eds gets people engaged and buying subscriptions.
Fox News is a bit strange because the pundits on there claim the rest of the media has an agenda, but then often gets caught passing along unverified stories or outright fabricating them. It's all business though, people keep tuning in.
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The Fox tabloid doesn't get "caught", it's their modus operandi. They have gone to court claiming no "reasonable" person would take what is said seriously [businessinsider.com].
One of their reporters stated a bald faced lie during the Lybian uprising by claiming CNN was willingly participating as human shields by going on a tour of some site. Nic Robertson, whose credentials are impeccable, not only called out the Fox "reporter" [cnn.com],
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They're an excellent newspaper, for the most part. It has minimal left-wing bias, but has been happy to print op-eds by Thatcherites and Reaganites, showing a level of impartiality that, say, Fox News never had.
You must have left out the /sarcasm tag
As a matter of personal freedom . . . (Score:2)
Oh, I'll take the doomsday clock over the others (Score:2)
Compared to the other catastrophic, alarming, and terrifying threats that the ginning up to save its existence, this one is something we can all immediately relate to and even measure. Sure, I'll take it. Wipe those other things off the front page, please.
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*the media* is ginning up. Grrr. No edit function!
Time is (nearly) infinitely divisible. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well, no. We know that the more accurately we measure time, the more entropy we generate. Of course, this isn't a real clock, it's a representation of danger on a specific day, via qualitative measures expressed in a quantitative way.
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Don't worry, in a few years someone will sneeze and Russia will use it as an excuse to invade Poland or some other country Americans never think about (Moldova? Azerbaijan? Latvia?).
While that chaos unfolds, China will take Taiwan back and a few other islands for good measure (Senkaku Islands probably. Spratly Islands maybe. ). On the assumption that US can't handle multiple high level negotiations at once, and nobody in the EU has the tools needed to negotiate (or are as unpredictable as the US is when it
Planck Time (Score:2)
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Eventually we will be advancing the clock by hundredths or thousandths of a second to keep the schtick going.
Zeno’s paradox strikes again.
lol (Score:2, Troll)
And remember, this is "science"! Any other opinions are "anti-science".
On 24 October 1962
It's going to become "Zeno's Clock" [wikipedia.org] at this rate.
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Well, no, it's not science and nobody claims it is science. Creating a straw man may amuse you but it consumes far more of Slashdot's server space than it merits.
Why emphasize the credentials, then? (Score:3, Informative)
> Well, no, it's not science and nobody claims it is science.
Right, they don't claim it's science, they just emphasize the irrelevant scientific credentials of the people doing it and play up the fear by talking about "extinction" which let's highlight to have a look:
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The scientific credentials are important as they're the ones who know how to attribute risk. And, yes, global warming has started a mass extinction event, which may eventually include humans. Nuclear war was a very realistic possibility (America would have "retaliated" had their 50c component on a hydrogen bomb worked as intended and blown up North Carolina; Russia was one person short of launching a full-scale attack over a weather satellite). If you want to underplay the dangers, that's your problem.
They couldn't even figure out what bombs are for (Score:2)
> The scientific credentials are important as they're the ones who know how to attribute risk.
If they're experts on how these weapons are to be deployed, why did they make the damned thing in the first place, knowing the use of it would "outrage" them?
Or, conversely, if they couldn't even figure out that making a giant bomb during a world war would kill a bunch of people, why should we listen to them as if they're experts on the subject of when nuclear weapons will be deployed when they clearly don't kno
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It's not science. It's a public talking point from a committee of scientists, intended to raise awareness about how close we are coming to disaster.
Damn! (Score:2)
100 seconds to midnight
I thought that was lunchtime.
Chicken Little (Score:2, Insightful)
Some people seem to like to live their lives in terror.
Impending nuclear catastrophe.
Climate disaster.
Now we all get to wear masks.
I mean, I guess they're right: we are all, someday, going to die.
Last time I checked though, (to steal from Zombie Survival Guide) there is no 'safe', only 'safer'. And every choice we make is a compromise between safety and practicality: we don't wear 5-point harnesses, crash helmets, and fireproof suits every time we drive our cars, despite KNOWING that those things absolutel
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Ummm, we didn't have a nuclear disaster because people thought it was a stupid thing to have a disaster about because they became aware that it wasn't fun and games. Guess why that was.
Climate disaster is likely because people like you think it's hilarious to have a disaster about.
We get to wear masks because the anti-mask, anti-vax brigade created a far worse disaster than ever needed to have happened. Had correct measures been taken from the start, Covid would have been wiped out inside a couple of months
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I'd argue that anyone who needs to have world situations explained to them by something as banal as a 'doomsday clock' is too stupid to matter.
There's very little science going into developing the gauge. Basically none. It's leftist PR.
It STARTED at '7 minutes to midnight!!!!" (panic!) in 1947.
1960-68 (ie even during the CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS it didn't get closer than 7 mins to midnight.
Just based on Reagan's election, they moved it from 9 to 7 mins. Hilarious. During Reagan's tenure they moved it up to
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Some people seem to like to live their lives in terror.
Impending nuclear catastrophe.
Climate disaster.
Now we all get to wear masks.
"They can't get enough of that doomsday song" - David Bowie, The Next Day
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"Dude, you're driving towards that red light at 60 miles per hour, maybe you should slow down?"
"Shut up, you're always so negative, we're all going to die sometime and we can't predict when!"
So... maybe let's slow down the headlong rush into disaster? That's not living in terror, that's just being smart. Maybe exercise some too while we're at it, eat more veggies? There was indeed an impending nuclear catastrophe, it's pretty amazing if someone tries to claim that this was never true and nukes were never
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" There was indeed an impending nuclear catastrophe"
No, logically, there WASN'T. It never happened.
There was widespread FEAR of one.
Whether that was justified or not, that I can't speak to: but clearly, it hasn't happened (yet).
And if you think we didn't have that nuclear catastrophe because a bunch of hippies laid down in front of trains, or because the (turns-out-they-were-funded-by-the-KGB) European protesters 'scared' Ronald Reagan somehow, then you're just lying to yourself.
I was born in 1967. I very
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"Impending" doesn't mean it WILL happen, just that it's very likely to happen if you don't do anything. An impending crash with a car means you had better turn the wheel or apply the brakes. It was clear that people were making plans to use nukes during the Cuban missle crisis; there were fail-safe triggers set up so that one mistake would cause missiles to fire without human intervention. There were indeed generals who felt that if you didn't use the bomb then what was the point of having then.
Whatever. US won't to anything. (Score:2)
The only hopeful news right now is that the US isn't going to do anything about anything at all. Russia could nuke Kansas City and Biden and congress wouldn't do anything at all. News media would bicker of who's fault it is. Then it would all pass over and two weeks later we would be talking about baseball starting up again.
We certainly aren't going to war with Russia over Ukraine.
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Trump was the first US president since WWI that was too stupid to get America into a war. Not that he didn't try, he tried several times, but was thwarted by his own utter incompetence. Biden on the other hand is too worried about some one might not like him to start a war.
Honestly both are fine foreign policy positions in my opinion.
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Russia could nuke Kansas City
Nuking Kansas City [imdb.com] would bring about the second coming of Steve Guttenberg, which is far more terrifying.
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TDS strikes again!
Uh-oh (Score:2)
Your post here demands a certain response. (Score:2)
Re: Uh-oh (Score:2)
If this is not already the basis of an article for The Onion, they should snag that shit up.
Then I guess we've finally reached... (Score:1)
With 70% of Americans (Score:2, Insightful)
In our current system systemic changes always leave some people screwed. Usually about 10 to 15% of the population gets left behind. And it's completely random
Re: With 70% of Americans (Score:2)
The problem is the fix requires most immediately trampling on people's "freedoms". Since we cannot embrace this position, even if temporarily, we are basically doomed. And when I say "freedoms" I mean it super ambiguously like raising taxes or changing social policy.
Depends on what you mean by "Freedom" (Score:2)
Put another way, if [insert name of Billionaire you don't like here] wanted you to do something and you didn't want to, what do you think would happen? If [insert name of Billionaire you don't like here] called your boss and said "Fire IdanceNmyCar or else" what would your boss do? How about if [insert name of Billionaire you don't like here] called your boss an
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Living paycheck to paycheck none of this matters. I've said it before and I'll say it again, climate change is years from now and rent is due at the end of the month. So long as 70% of Americans are one layoff away from couchsurfing if they're lucky and homelessness if they're not they're going to fight anything that might upset their apple carts.
In our current system systemic changes always leave some people screwed. Usually about 10 to 15% of the population gets left behind. And it's completely random which 10 to 15% it is. That just happens to be about the percentage you need for a minority to disrupt any political process. At least if military manuals regarding political disruption using minorities are to be believed. This is not an accident. It's demographics.
In short if you want to do something about climate change you need to fix the economy first.
You should try traveling to a poor country. In poor countries they don't have homeless people who are morbidly obese. They have police that are real criminals who will do you real harm if not bribed regularly. Being poor in America is equivalent to being upper middle class in many countries of the world. Which is why so many the US's southern neighbors risk life and limb to migrate here.
What does this have to do with any of my points? (Score:2)
I get that my ideas make you uncomfortable, but that doesn't make them wrong.
Advice from the grave (Score:2, Troll)
All the atomic scientists are now dead. This "Bulletin" is run by a bunch of fortune tellers who think they can communicate with the dead. Oh, and also by a bunch of left-wing activists.
That clock is a joke now (Score:3)
It stopped being relevant when they started adding things like climate change to the mix.
Climate change is serious, but it is threat of a different nature.
The original threat that the doomsday clock was made for is a global nuclear war. The idea is that you just live your life, and one day, a president pisses off another president, missiles are fired, other missiles are fired in response, and the next day, you are in hell, if there is a next day.
Climate change is a gradual process, something that will affect us over decades, it is a process we can slow down, accelerate, mitigate along the way. It is not a "doomsday", more like a "doomscentury".
We can even consider them opposites. One of the most feared outcomes of a global nuclear war is a "nuclear winter", global cooling.
Maybe we should find another analogy than a clock for climate change, maybe something like a sinking ship, and leave the clock for more immediate threats.
Panic Merchants (Score:2)
These guys obviously have 'forgotten' what it was like in the 60s. When i was growing up the 6 o'clock news was a continual diet of tanks helicopters and explosions.
Sets risk? I don't think so. (Score:2)
The idea that this artificial clock "sets" the risk of anything is one of the most unscientific ideas I have ever heard, not to mention a ridiculous conceit, a sign of a magical world view, and an if-we-believe-it-it-must-be-true level of solipsism.
Doomsday Clock (Score:1)
Why does anyone still listen to these clowns?