Atomic Scientists Adjust 'Doomsday Clock' Closer Than Ever To Midnight (reuters.com) 160
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved their Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds before midnight on Tuesday, the closest to catastrophe in the timepiece's 78-year history. The Chicago-based group cited Russia's nuclear threats during its Ukraine invasion, growing tensions in the Middle East, China's military pressure near Taiwan, and the rapid advancement of AI as key factors. The symbolic clock, created in 1947 by scientists including Albert Einstein, moved one second closer than last year's setting.
They forgot to mention... (Score:1, Insightful)
Clock moved wrong way (Score:2, Insightful)
TRUMP
Yes, Trump who has ended the Gaza war, and is about to end the Ukrainian war.
It wasn't until Trump came that Putin started talking peace. And Trump has halter permission for deep strikes into Russia from Ukraine which was always going to be a potential trigger for Russia to use nukes in response.
How is the world MORE in danger of nuclear war if the fight between Ukraine and Russia (really the West and Russia) is over? Seems safer to me.
Re: (Score:2)
Apparently the desire to keep their seat in congress overrides their political ideals, ethics, and morality. I can understand that though, given that they have no actual job skills were they to not be elected or appointed to administration positions.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually the Republicans had a workable plan to fund Ukraine's defense by stripping out the IRS's bloated budget. It never went anywhere because enforcing all those 1099K audits on eBayers is so much more important.
Re: (Score:2)
There is a tentative ceasefire in Gaza with hostage and prisoner releases. Israel seems to be getting the short end of the stick, especially since some of the hostages to be released are already dead.
Re:Clock moved wrong way (Score:5, Insightful)
Ceasefire which started a day before Trump took office, meaning the negotiations had been underway by Biden administration. Maybe it was a favor to Trump, just like Iran gave a favor to Reagan, but there still was a lot of work in both cases before movement happened.
Re: Clock moved wrong way (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Food for thought: we enjoy the most peaceful period ever in history, and that peaceful period is ours because of nuclear weapons.
You can only load a spring so much.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well MAD may help keep the peace to an extent. But one important point to consider the possibility of an "oops". IIRC there have been a couple times in history we came close to nukes being launched between USA and USSR due to a faulty reading or a misunderstanding. Dangerously close, too. The story quite possibly could have ended a different way.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Clock moved wrong way (Score:2)
Re: Clock moved wrong way (Score:2)
Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a recurring political stunt by people with no special claim to knowledge who are going with whatever their gut tells them.
Giving it credence is just... silly.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
The people over at The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) can be safely ignored. While they claim to be "atomic scientists" the articles I've read from them show they are quite ignorant on how modern nuclear power plants work. Maybe by "atomic scientists" they mean "scientists made of atoms"? A political scientists is still technically a scientist but that doesn't mean they can speak on nuclear physics with any authority.
The original goal of BAS was to warn people of the danger of nuclear weapons and use that as leverage against politicians to reduce nuclear weapons, eliminate them entirely, or at least put in controls among the nations with nuclear weapons to avoid "mutually assured destruction". In my opinion (and it's worth what you paid for it) they've been successful. I see no harm in them publishing a bulletin for the public, but I also don't see the utility in their "doomsday clock".
Once treaties were put in place to put the real risk of nuclear weapons used in war again BAS lost most any reason to exist. If they didn't expand their scope of political action then they'd get little interest for membership as there would be next to nothing to talk about. So, they expanded their scope to opposing nuclear power, and did so with tortured logic on how nuclear power leads to nuclear weapons. If anything "nukulur" means someone is going to level a major city at some point then do we include nuclear medicine? Research and development of nuclear medicine has saved many lives and improved the health of many more. Many of the isotopes used in medicine come from nuclear power. Also from nuclear power comes isotopes for industry and science, especially anything that explores space. Nuclear power is also low in CO2 emissions, very safe, and at a cost competitive with fossil fuels.
When nuclear power comes up there's always a mention of decades old reactors like those that self destructed at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. Nobody is going to build a reactor like those again. Instead look at newer designs like CANDU, a pressurized heavy water reactor that can use a variety of fuels (including thorium), produces valued isotopes for industry and medicine, has an established record of safety and affordability, and as a proven design we don't need new rules or studies to complicate licensing. We only need people in the NRC to issue permits than object to them over BS they made up, and a little help from our cousins to the north on training up some engineers and technicians.
BAS talking about global warming is a bit of a chuckle. If they hadn't been so vocally opposed to nuclear power for the last 50+ years then we would not be facing the same kind of threat of global warming, and threats of an energy shortage, and possibly resource wars like in Ukraine and more, and as much global poverty. They aren't alone in this, Greenpeace needs a mention as a cure worse than the disease.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
When nuclear power comes up there's always a mention of decades old reactors like those that self destructed at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. Nobody is going to build a reactor like those again.
This is usually my first point of argument for nuclear power. Most of the power plants in the US were designed in the 1960s and built in the 1970s. Gauging how efficient or safe they are is like talking about automotive safety and bringing up AMC Matadors or Dodge Diplomats. These things were designed on graph paper using slide rules and printed engineering tables. Technology has advanced since then.
Re: (Score:2)
They're not wrong that nuclear power plants could be used to make nuclear weapons. Of course that risk can be negated by having an untrickable unbribable inspector make sure they're not using the reactor to make plutonium nor the centrifuges to make weapons-grade uranium. But opposition to nuclear may have been a mistake -- it may be the fact that we didn't switch from coal to nuclear 50 years ago that might cause the next global war.
As for the Doomsday Clock, the planet has been closer to the next thousand
Re: (Score:2)
They're not wrong that nuclear power plants could be used to make nuclear weapons. Of course that risk can be negated by having an untrickable unbribable inspector make sure they're not using the reactor to make plutonium...
To produce weapon grade plutonium in a power plant means they'd be switching out fuel rods very often. I don't know how often but more often than the typical 18 to 24 month fuel cycle most every civil nuclear power plant is on. Satellites can detect when a nuclear power plant is operating based off heat and other activity. There doesn't need to be an inspector on the ground for this, and there's ample opportunity for many nations to check the work of others with this technology.
One reason there were no c
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. It puts politics into the scientific profession where it doesn't belong, harming its reputation.
Nuke the clock!
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Funny)
But it's cool to see Zeno's paradox in action.
We get closer and closer to Doomsday but never reach it.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
The probability that Russia will launch nukes does not correlate with Putin threatening to launch nukes.
Re: (Score:2)
Mostly true, with the exception that Biden isn't responsible for Putin's madness and visions of more Lebensraum.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Funny)
Nah, the problem is they just need to rename it to something more appropriate for the Idiocracy timeline we're living in, like "Fucked-o-Meter".
Re: (Score:2)
Forever to be known as the Fundraising Clock.
Re: (Score:2)
This is a recurring political stunt by people with no special claim to knowledge who are going with whatever their gut tells them.
Giving it credence is just... silly.
This reminds me of the current failure of the Marvell movies. We just have to keep topping the latest bad guy so every new movie has greater and greater stakes. Doesn't really work in the long run.
Re: (Score:2)
Movies about networking equipment and microcontrollers were never a good idea.
Re: (Score:2)
... it's a fairly good indicator for tracking several extremely high risk scenarios that we are blowing off.
How do you judge the goodness of this indicator?
joshua what are you doing? (Score:3)
joshua what are you doing?
Re: (Score:2)
Meh (Score:5, Insightful)
Bring it. This was a useful kind of stunt during the Cold War, but right now we're in the reality of 'fight or capitulate'.
We will never have a paradise if we keep giving in to sociopaths when they threaten us.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I suspect you won't like my saying this, but I'd say Trump, especially Trump part 2 is the Dem's fault.
The Dems had generally "won" the big war against the "Religious Right" around the time Obama was running against McCain.... soo 2008?
And "the neocons" (remember them ?) were also basically sent packing. The hated GWB was termed out and by the end of Obama Iraq was done. and the 2007 crash was recovered from.
Same sex marriage was won.
But instead of chilling there the Dems (and fighting with the neocons
Re: (Score:2)
They already set fire to the arsonist. It didn't work.
Re: (Score:2)
They shook their finger at him and said they were quite cross and thinking about giving him a timeout. Then they counted to 3. And around '2' they started adding fractions.
But it doesn't matter, that's just the biggest leaking pustule on the diseased body. If not this one, it'd have been another. It's been a long time coming and every step of the way, too many people kept their heads down and hoped the problem would go away so they wouldn't have to risk anything themselves.
Obligatory (Score:5, Interesting)
I would only agree that a symbolic clock is as nourishing to the intellect as a photograph of oxygen to a drowning man.
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Informative)
So your favorite statement about a symbolic clock is by a fictional character?
Got anything real to say?
To the parents point, does that symbolic clock have anything real to say, or does it exist to sell the worst smelling FUD ever? Gotta love the point of those clock watchers. When the nukes are raining down, all of humanity will know what fucking time it is.
We’ve been standing on an infamous red-button defensive line that’s less than 30 minutes away from nuclear annihilation for decades now. That is all the reality we ever need in the MAD era. That and realizing a doomsday clock exists to sell shit and always has.
Re: (Score:2)
Weâ(TM)ve been standing on an infamous red-button defensive line thatâ(TM)s less than 30 minutes away from nuclear annihilation for decades now. That is all the reality we ever need in the MAD era. That and realizing a doomsday clock exists to sell shit and always has.
I don't doubt that someone, somewhere is selling crap related to the doomsday clock, so I won't bother to even look. What I want to know is, why is it considered invalid to remind people that nuclear deterrents are nuclear doom waiting to happen?
Re: (Score:2)
So your favorite statement about a symbolic clock is by a fictional character?
The words were written by a real person and then put in the mouth of a fictional character for the purpose of entertainment and political commentary. The entire point of a clock is to symbolize the passing of time, or perhaps more specifically the position of the sun in the sky. It would follow that people would use a clock to symbolize time in other ways. The clock is an avatar of time, and the characters in a work of fiction are avatars of their creator, it seems fitting for one work of fiction to conv
Re: (Score:2)
Because millions of people ignore the real world, ignore logic and common sense, and instead have to be presented with an inflated fictional version of a problem before it sinks in. Some people are stupid and so you have to use stupid means to get the point across. For a very few people even these stupid means go well over their heads.
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, your comment was a pretty idiotic attempt at trolling.
Hopefully (Score:2)
The Doomsday clock won't "spring forward" by an hour anytime soon
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
It only springs forward when a Republican is in office. It basically amounts to a bunch of liberal scientists angrily waving their hankies anytime they lose an election.
Note that there hasn't been a nuclear war since 1945, no matter what the damn clock says.
Re:Hopefully (Score:4, Insightful)
It basically amounts to a bunch of liberal scientists angrily waving their hankies anytime they lose an election.
Well, most reasonable people will take that over the ultra-right storming Congress when they lose an election, any day.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, ignore the massive amounts of footage showing the mob vandalizing the Capitol and assaulting police. It's all lies. Trump says so.
Re:Hopefully (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, ignore the massive amounts of footage showing the mob vandalizing the Capitol and assaulting police. It's all lies. Trump says so.
Or, for that matter, the fact that usually reliable Trump toady Lindsay Graham says that Trump shouldn't have pardoned some of those people - as did JD Vance, BEFORE the pardons came anyway (then radio silence afterward).
Re: (Score:2)
"Note that there hasn't been a nuclear war since 1945, no matter what the damn clock says."
Well it only takes one nuclear war to wipe out civilisation.
But I think the current doomsday clock also takes into account other civilisation-ending probabilities like climate change and pandemics.
And maybe even some non human-caused events (asteroids, supervolcanoes)
Re: (Score:2)
But I think the current doomsday clock also takes into account other civilisation-ending probabilities like climate change and pandemics.
If the clock is about threats other than anything "atomic" then shouldn't they give themselves a new name? Like "Union of Concerned Scientists"? Oh, right, there's a group by that name already. If this is about keeping things "green" and peaceful then "Green Peace"? No, that's taken too. "Science for the People"? No. "Center for Science in the Public Interest"? Dammit, that's taken too.
If they want to pick a specific area of concern then that's great. If they spread their areas of concern too thin
Re: (Score:2)
There was no nuclear war in 1945 either, there were two nuclear bombs.
Here's an interesting thought experiment: let's say Donald Trump decides to drop a nuclear bomb on Suriname for absolutely no reason, just because he thinks it's fun. Of course it would be supremely bad for diplomatic relations but I don't think any country will retaliate with another nuclear bomb for it. They will send vast humanitarian aid to Suriname and pretty much the entire world will paint it as a horrible act, or not, because they
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
It only springs forward when a Republican is in office.
This doesn't tie in with the timeline [wikipedia.org], as we moved 14 minutes further away from midnight in the G.H.W.Bush administration, and then sprang forward a total of 8 minutes in the Clinton administration.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well to be fair, that's when most wars by the U.S.A. tend to start, no?
Where's (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
31 seconds in "the past."
1 nanosecond to midnight / all right / heavy metal (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They are victims of Zeno's paradox. Every year we get halfway to midnight relative to last year. Luckily, that means we never reach midnight! (And don't tell me that's not exactly what Zeno's paradox[es] is.)
Run by professional activists, not scientists (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Troll? He did exaggerate sllightly, I'll admit. Of the 21 members of their Governing Board, exactly *one* is any kind of physicist: Daniel Holz. https://thebulletin.org/about-... [thebulletin.org]
89 seconds before midnight (Score:2)
I guess that means Max Headroom's world has blown up.
Fear Mongers (Score:2)
Here's a number with no scale. Be afraid!
When you learn that their absolute best time was 11:47 (13 to midnight) and not noon you know these are non-credible people.
They diminish actual credible people who have actual credible warnings. Watch Scott Ritter's warning on Judging Freedom from just before the election where he brought the receipts as an actual weapons inspector.
And don't worry, he thinks Trump may screw this up too.
But nobody should give this Doomsday Clock any oxygen.
Feds are running a nuclea
Fractional seconds (Score:2)
would give them more room to keep tweaking the hands. Instead of running out of seconds in only the next 90 years or so, they'd have 180 or more years to keep inching the hands forward, before they have to move to milliseconds.
What a load of (Score:2)
crap.
So in THEIR opinion they think it's an arbitrary number like 89 seconds?
What does that even mean? Seeing as a second represents many years, I'm not at all worried. It may have been a neat idea back in the late 40's sure but really it seems to be just another way to get your photo taken as you sit down with a bunch of people, go knows who they are, to randomly decide to inform the world that you randomly chose this arbitrary number that represents nothing as a means to get you worried enough to get the
Re:Orange man bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Apparently the best way to handle things is to pretend everything is swell and suppress anyone who says differently.
The US is paying the price for allowing greed and ignorance to become dominant cultural values.
Re: Orange man bad (Score:2)
"the US is paying the price!"
What, being the only meaningful superpower, 1/4 of the world economy, and the first to wake from the slow cultural suicide of woke bullshit?
Gee, make me "pay the price" some more, please.
Re: Orange man bad (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
every day there are fewer and fewer wealthy people.
But they get more and more wealthy.
Re: Orange man bad (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
I think the problem is that Trump now qualifies as a religion.
I think the OP was specifically referring to the way his post was being downmodded by MAGAs with mod points. Personally, I just find the situation rather hilarious that there are actually people who truly believe that this site has any sort of influential power over how people vote. These days, Slashdot's market share is like a rounding error compared against any of the major social media sites.
Plus, since so many folks use the moderation system here to grind their political axe and most of the genuine tr
Re: Orange man bad (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
They are an angry people and sadly they feel the need to lash out.
They're a sizeable voting bloc and it's no surprise that someone has tapped into it.
Re: (Score:2)
It is absolutely hilarious that I am that far stuck in somebody's head.
Re: Orange man bad (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
It's called the paradox of tolerance. You can't tolerate the intolerant. The one thing that no society can tolerate his anti-democratic behavior. It has to be ruthlessly weeded out. Otherwise you end up in a fascist dictatorship. And we are well on the way to that
Re: Orange man bad (Score:2)
Re: Orange man bad (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think the problem is that Trump now qualifies as a religion.
The sheer amount of "stupid" and "criminal" on display in that administration would certainly be a match for that.
Re: (Score:2)
Also God only knows what the hell the supreme Court is going to do. Amy Barrett for example is a completely incompetent buffoon. She couldn't answer high school civi
Re: (Score:2)
Simple people prefer simple solutions, no matter how simplistic. Now when you elect a simplistic leader those are the sorts of solutions you get. You really can't expect him to spend more than 5 seconds thinking about the issues before providing a solution, he's a busy busy man with a very busy marker pen.
Re: Orange man bad (Score:2)
Re: Orange man bad (Score:2)
Re: Orange man bad (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
The only question now is whether the US will descend into civil war as the people who voted for him begin to starve and die, or if people outside the US will start to retaliate against it.
There's never any buyers' remorse from his supporters. If a pandemic didn't sour them on Trump, nothing will.
As for the possibility of a civil war, head on over to ChatGPT and ask it "Why doesn't Russia have a civil war to remove Putin?" You'll be surprised how many similar parallels can be found between the situation in Russia and the USA. In a nutshell, there's a playbook authoritarian leaders follow to prevent civil unrest, and guess what - it works.
Re: (Score:2)
Trump? No. He is a leader by historcial accident, same as Musk. But even with a very limited intellect, you can copy patterns that you do not actually understand.
See, for example, Musk and the Nazi salute he gave. He probably thinks that it is a "power gesture". The little problem that it symbolizes mass-murder of all dissenters is likely outside of what his small mind can grasp.
Re: Orange man bad (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Science tends to have a left-leaning bias.
It wasn't always that way. At least not that I've seen.
The first time I attended university things seemed pretty much down the middle, if not leaning right. Sure, there were the NORML activists, those demanding Columbus Day be changed to Indigenous People's Day, and a few other examples I might be able to think up. But then the university I attended focused on engineering, agriculture & life sciences, and animal science & veterinary medicine. (If "animal science" is something you had not heard o
Re:Atomic Scientists (Score:4, Informative)
Science tends to have a left-leaning bias.
Science, has no bias.
Biased humans who claim to be scientists, do.
Re: (Score:2)
Stone cold mathematical logic has no bias.
Most science is very light on that and the overwhelming majority of things normally accepted as “science” require a lot of human wet fingerwork and interpretation of data. There is very much a subset of of science which is governed by the zero wiggle-room rules of cold mathematical logic where no human influence can meddle with, but that's a subset.
Re: (Score:2)
Science tends to have a left-leaning bias.
Not actually. Factual reality is more denied by the right, because they are dumber. This is well documented and solid Science. Science itself is neutral.
Re: (Score:2)
In the U.S.A., yes, but consider that almost the entire world has a “left leaning bias” compared to the U.S.A. because compared to most of the world, it has two parties: one far right, and one ultra far right.
There is no significant party in most of Europe that's even considering at-will employement a real option, and there is no significant party in the U.S.A. that makes it a serious point to abolish it. The U.S.A. needs to start realizing that “left of centre in the U.S.A.” really
Re:Forgot trump (Score:5, Insightful)
Tic, tic, tic... I for one am ready for the Mad Max world. Bring it on!
Oh sure, everyone imagines they'll be some badass alpha in the post-apocalyptic future. The reality is you'll probably end up dead from an infected hangnail that could've been cured with some antibiotics, but that pesky societal collapse...
Re: (Score:2)
As an aside, alphas really aren't a thing. It was copied from the wolf world. Except that wolves in real life are woke. Seriously, female wolves are the top dog and there really aren't alpha versus beta males. But hey, if it makes those gym rats have a bit more self esteem then let them have it; nothing worse than a depressed hunk of muscles.
Re: (Score:2)
Our stone age ancestors somehow survived.
Re: (Score:2)
Life is a disease with 100 percent lethality.
Re: (Score:2)
The reality is you'll probably end up dead from an infected hangnail that could've been cured with some antibiotics, but that pesky societal collapse...
Honestly, billions of people will not even make it THAT far. They will die of starvation or exposure within weeks. During this chaos, many will die through the violence of their neighbors and friends who are suddenly desperate in way never thought possible by a lazy and protected population.
Yeah, sounds like fun. Lots of glory to be had.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Everyone is a tough guy on the Internet. Let's see what you think when someone kicks in your door and shoots you because they heard you have canned goods.
Re: (Score:2)
I’m glad Trump is spending $800k a pop to deport a handful of people. https://m.economictimes.com/nr... [economictimes.com]