Doomsday Clock Moves One Minute Closer to Armageddon

[CardinalPiggles]

My problem with this is that they started on a seemingly random setting, so there seems to be no reason to panic just because it reaches 0, after all based on this design we're only 2 minutes closer to doomsday than we were 55 years ago.

 

[Waaghpowa]

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists agreed the world is less safe than it was two years ago.

You'd be very careful out there folks, cause we're at TERROR ALERT ORANGE [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKNI-9eFv8I#t=1m54s] today, so look sharp!

Maybe it will just be toast this time.

 

[DanielBrown]

Obamas election filled the WORLD with hope?


Wake up, USA.

 

[Kinguendo]

"Hey, you know how we invented that thing that makes wiping ourselves out a very real possibility?"

"Yeah?"

"Well, now we have a clock that tells people how close we are to it now too."

"Isnt that fear mongering?"

"No, no, no, no. Its fine... oh and we called it the Doomsday Clock. Bye."

I bet thats exactly what was said when the Doomsday Clock was conceived.

 

[CarlMin]

I was about to say something about how stupid and inaccurate I think this Doomsday Clock is. Then I realized that the point isn't how well of a visual metaphor the clock is, but rather the reasons the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had for moving the clock 1 minute closer to midnight. I figured that the people at BAS make a pretty valid point after all.

Then I also did something else that I normally don't. I followed the source to the original article and found out that the reasons BAS had for moving clock back to where it was 2007 were pretty sensible and logical, focusing on rising international tensions, failure to decrease present dangers of nuclear proliferation, failure to find alternative energy sources to compensate for economic growth in developing nations, etc. Not at all the doomsday sensationalism I had expected.

I'm really glad that I took time to read the original article before just ranting on the clock, which I guess would be pretty meaningless criticism anyway to begin with.

 

[Proverbial Jon]

Just a guess but I'd say that clock is about as acurate as this one:

But, that clock is extraordinarily accurate.
What time is it?
Calibration time.

Clearly the Doomsday Clock's "time" is realtive to whoever decides to set it, much like Garrus' clock is relative to him and him only. I mean, it can't be calibration time ALL the time. Can it?

Evidently there's a higher, philosophical context going on here. A social commentary on the state of our world. I just can't seem to find it...

I see it as Schröedinger's calibration box. Whenever you're not around, Garrus is both calibrating, and not calibrating, only when you talk to him do you know for certain if he's calibrating or not (note: he's always calibrating). If a tree were to fall in the forest and noone were around to hear it, does Garrus still calibrate?

OT: My own doomsday clock has 2 more weeks to go, no worries yet.

I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favourite quantum mechanics theory on the Citadel.

Seriously though, that made me laugh so much, thanks for that! So... going by your theory, was Garrus still calibrating when he and FemShep were "blowing off steam" together?

Whichever way you look at it, The Normandy is one hell of a finely tuned ship by now!

 

[Terminate421]

The sad thing is that no government is even ATTEMPTING to help the environment. I am not a green nut but it really does suck that we can't even do the simplest of tasks to help the only things that exist in the universe.

 

[kotorfan04]

Just a guess but I'd say that clock is about as acurate as this one:

But, that clock is extraordinarily accurate.
What time is it?
Calibration time.

Clearly the Doomsday Clock's "time" is realtive to whoever decides to set it, much like Garrus' clock is relative to him and him only. I mean, it can't be calibration time ALL the time. Can it?

Evidently there's a higher, philosophical context going on here. A social commentary on the state of our world. I just can't seem to find it...

I see it as Schröedinger's calibration box. Whenever you're not around, Garrus is both calibrating, and not calibrating, only when you talk to him do you know for certain if he's calibrating or not (note: he's always calibrating). If a tree were to fall in the forest and noone were around to hear it, does Garrus still calibrate?

OT: My own doomsday clock has 2 more weeks to go, no worries yet.

I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favourite quantum mechanics theory on the Citadel.

Seriously though, that made me laugh so much, thanks for that! So... going by your theory, was Garrus still calibrating when he and FemShep were "blowing off steam" together?

Whichever way you look at it, The Normandy is one hell of a finely tuned ship by now!

I would have loved it if when the Normandy fired in the Collector battle it missed, Garrus spazes out about not callibrating enough and then everyone dies.

OT: I liked the idea of a Doomsday clock when it just focused on how close we were to blowing each other up in fiery nuclear holocaust, but if it is not just trying to predict when the world will end... seems about as useful and helpful as me predicting the odds of us getting hit by a gamma ray burst tomorrow.

 

[Guardian of Nekops]

Suitcase nukes are not fine, period, if in the unlikely case that this technologically unfeasible idea ever came to pass then they would be the next case scenario for the use of nukes. Being smaller, using less infrastructure and needing to monitor tens of thousands of miles of uninhabited coastline on North America alone it makes it far less likely to caught then you envision. Also suicidal maniacs of various flavours are at an all time high right now and are not restricted to Muslim states. maybe not world wide annihilation but still a devastating first strike that is all too feasible if no alternative is given.

For a devastating first strike, on one decent-sized country (sorry Japan, not sure how to jelp you just now), using suitcase nukes, you need to have over a thousand people who are willing to die (assuming packages small enough to be transported by just one person), and who are also willing to follow orders. You also need to sneak them into high population areas with packages which are still rather large, unless all you want to destroy is uninhabited coastline. The explosions of these are not even large enough to destroy most cities with less than a dozen operatives and warheads. Also, good luck getting them into the military bases that will be mobilized to kill you once you do this.

Compare this amount of effort to pushing a button.

What's to stop folks from making cruise missiles more effective if no alternative is given. That's right, nothing at all. Do try not to underestimate man's desire to kill other men.

And they're going to test their new cruise missiles and their ability to cross oceans where? Ditto for stealth missiles that can evade detection by the specific tracking systems used. (which should be updated often.) You just don't make things, you have to experiment. Try, and fail. And if your missiles need to be able to cross an ocean, keeping those tests secret isn't going to be easy.

Star Wars fell apart for 2 reasons. One it was prohibitively expensive and 2 the tech did not and still does not exist for it to work. Not flawlessly, not even mostly. Do you really think the US gave a crap if someone else objected to their having full control over weapons in space? I mean really? In fact the program has been renamed several times and has been shown to be no more effective now than it was then. Not one proposal they came up with so far has been even remotely close to useful as a main focus of safety.

We figured that splitting the atom was impossible, too, until we seriously tried it. Like, capital i Impossible. And then, for a long time, doing anything practical with it seemed prohibitively expensive.

And yes, I DO think the US cared if someone objected, using nuclear weapons, to their having full control over weapons in space before they DID. I think that might possibly be a point of concern, yes.

But let's look at what we would need for it to work. It requires thousands of satellites with rockets on them (because fricking lasers are still in the realm of sci-fi for this purpose) set in a stationary orbit over fixed locations with agreement from all countries involved that they be allowed in place. It also needs the complete co-operation of every country involved in allowing it to be set up. It needs no one to tamper with the way it is set up. It requires that no one attempts to sabotage it after it is set up.

Well, except for the fact that an attempt to destroy, sabotage, or circumvent the system would give the world more of a warning time than 12 minutes. It'd give us enough time to do something other than throw our hands up and hit the self destruct button.

In other words there is a God awful lot of point of failure here. If even one nuclear armed country found a way to compromise this thing here is what could conceivably happen. this one country would have the key to the entire world and destroy everyone but themselves with no retaliation at all thereby causing the very disaster you wanted to avert. It could happen.

Yes, if they circumvent it on the first try then this might happen, resulting in perhaps 20% of the world population surviving rather than nobody... still a win if they were crazy enough to take this gamble. However, if they try and FAIL, even once, they will tip their hand, do NO damage, and bring down swift international wrath upon their heads.

The current system of MAD ensures that as long as some degree of sanity is enacted nukes will not be used on a global scale. 60 years of history has shown that. It's not perfect but it does allow ones sense of personal survival to overcome ambition.

The current system of MAD assumes that only certain countries have nukes. That only leaders of countries, who tend to be men of earthly ambition, can control this technology.

Countries are no longer the only ones who control nukes. They haven't been since the fall of the Soviet Union... we don't know WHERE some of these things are, which makes the system obsolete. The fact that it hasn't killed us YET is hardly a glowing endorsement.

Even if none of the terrible things above came to pass with this missile shield, riddle me this. Who would be administering this? The UN? HA that's a laugh. The biggest nuclear gangsters in the world run that show. NATO? Uh uh. Who. Who would give them authority. Who would trust them. Who would watch them for possible corruption? There has to be people running this thing. It can't be left to computers they can compromised too. Get back to me when there is something other than wishful thinking and grade school naivete to this idea.

Granted. No current organization is fit to run this thing. Neither the UN nor NATO has much power, all told... this would have to be built from the ground up. Possibly with redundant systems put into place by the richer nations to make corruption/sabotage more difficult.

However, they don't need authority. All they need is this system, and the money to put it into place and defend its ground installations reasonably well... because again, any conventional military attack on their ground installation is at least a warning.

Add in a system that allows them to contact world leaders and alert populations, and they're pretty much set. There's no reason that this has to be more involved than, say, the Vatican Earthside.

I'm not saying this is easy or that the tech is ready yet, but right now our Plan B is death. For everbody. If thinking that any other system is worth exploring as opposed to hoping that Plan A never fails makes me naive, then I will happily accept that label.

 

[Mullahgrrl]

I can't honestly say that we're closer to the end of the human race today than we were 24 months ago.

Of course we are, 24 months closer.

 

[jklinders]

Suitcase nukes are not fine, period, if in the unlikely case that this technologically unfeasible idea ever came to pass then they would be the next case scenario for the use of nukes. Being smaller, using less infrastructure and needing to monitor tens of thousands of miles of uninhabited coastline on North America alone it makes it far less likely to caught then you envision. Also suicidal maniacs of various flavours are at an all time high right now and are not restricted to Muslim states. maybe not world wide annihilation but still a devastating first strike that is all too feasible if no alternative is given.

For a devastating first strike, on one decent-sized country (sorry Japan, not sure how to jelp you just now), using suitcase nukes, you need to have over a thousand people who are willing to die (assuming packages small enough to be transported by just one person), and who are also willing to follow orders. You also need to sneak them into high population areas with packages which are still rather large, unless all you want to destroy is uninhabited coastline. The explosions of these are not even large enough to destroy most cities with less than a dozen operatives and warheads. Also, good luck getting them into the military bases that will be mobilized to kill you once you do this.

Compare this amount of effort to pushing a button.

What's to stop folks from making cruise missiles more effective if no alternative is given. That's right, nothing at all. Do try not to underestimate man's desire to kill other men.

And they're going to test their new cruise missiles and their ability to cross oceans where? Ditto for stealth missiles that can evade detection by the specific tracking systems used. (which should be updated often.) You just don't make things, you have to experiment. Try, and fail. And if your missiles need to be able to cross an ocean, keeping those tests secret isn't going to be easy.

Star Wars fell apart for 2 reasons. One it was prohibitively expensive and 2 the tech did not and still does not exist for it to work. Not flawlessly, not even mostly. Do you really think the US gave a crap if someone else objected to their having full control over weapons in space? I mean really? In fact the program has been renamed several times and has been shown to be no more effective now than it was then. Not one proposal they came up with so far has been even remotely close to useful as a main focus of safety.

We figured that splitting the atom was impossible, too, until we seriously tried it. Like, capital i Impossible. And then, for a long time, doing anything practical with it seemed prohibitively expensive.

And yes, I DO think the US cared if someone objected, using nuclear weapons, to their having full control over weapons in space before they DID. I think that might possibly be a point of concern, yes.

But let's look at what we would need for it to work. It requires thousands of satellites with rockets on them (because fricking lasers are still in the realm of sci-fi for this purpose) set in a stationary orbit over fixed locations with agreement from all countries involved that they be allowed in place. It also needs the complete co-operation of every country involved in allowing it to be set up. It needs no one to tamper with the way it is set up. It requires that no one attempts to sabotage it after it is set up.

Well, except for the fact that an attempt to destroy, sabotage, or circumvent the system would give the world more of a warning time than 12 minutes. It'd give us enough time to do something other than throw our hands up and hit the self destruct button.

In other words there is a God awful lot of point of failure here. If even one nuclear armed country found a way to compromise this thing here is what could conceivably happen. this one country would have the key to the entire world and destroy everyone but themselves with no retaliation at all thereby causing the very disaster you wanted to avert. It could happen.

Yes, if they circumvent it on the first try then this might happen, resulting in perhaps 20% of the world population surviving rather than nobody... still a win if they were crazy enough to take this gamble. However, if they try and FAIL, even once, they will tip their hand, do NO damage, and bring down swift international wrath upon their heads.

The current system of MAD ensures that as long as some degree of sanity is enacted nukes will not be used on a global scale. 60 years of history has shown that. It's not perfect but it does allow ones sense of personal survival to overcome ambition.

The current system of MAD assumes that only certain countries have nukes. That only leaders of countries, who tend to be men of earthly ambition, can control this technology.

Countries are no longer the only ones who control nukes. They haven't been since the fall of the Soviet Union... we don't know WHERE some of these things are, which makes the system obsolete. The fact that it hasn't killed us YET is hardly a glowing endorsement.

Even if none of the terrible things above came to pass with this missile shield, riddle me this. Who would be administering this? The UN? HA that's a laugh. The biggest nuclear gangsters in the world run that show. NATO? Uh uh. Who. Who would give them authority. Who would trust them. Who would watch them for possible corruption? There has to be people running this thing. It can't be left to computers they can compromised too. Get back to me when there is something other than wishful thinking and grade school naivete to this idea.

Granted. No current organization is fit to run this thing. Neither the UN nor NATO has much power, all told... this would have to be built from the ground up. Possibly with redundant systems put into place by the richer nations to make corruption/sabotage more difficult.

However, they don't need authority. All they need is this system, and the money to put it into place and defend its ground installations reasonably well... because again, any conventional military attack on their ground installation is at least a warning.

Add in a system that allows them to contact world leaders and alert populations, and they're pretty much set. There's no reason that this has to be more involved than, say, the Vatican Earthside.

I'm not saying this is easy or that the tech is ready yet, but right now our Plan B is death. For everbody. If thinking that any other system is worth exploring as opposed to hoping that Plan A never fails makes me naive, then I will happily accept that label.

You are asking the most powerful nations in the world to limit their power. How exactly does this work. Human hands have to make this thing. Is there any kind of reasonable guarantee that this could not go really wrong as I said here

"In other words there is a God awful lot of point of failure here. If even one nuclear armed country found a way to compromise this thing here is what could conceivably happen. this one country would have the key to the entire world and destroy everyone but themselves with no retaliation at all thereby causing the very disaster you wanted to avert. It could happen."

All it takes is one crooked person involved in critical installation and the whole damn house of cards goes to pieces. I would feel safer with things as they are thank you very much. Or someone coercing one of those folks into compromising it. Leaving it to computers leaves it vulnerable to hacking. Leaving it to people leaves it vulnerable to coercion. Too damn many points of failure. This is also discounting the idea that any contractors involved may also have nefarious goals. Do you really want to leave that much control in so small a place? I don't


This one world crap only works if there is only one government.

Individuals with nukes have neither the resources nor the power to take this on a global scale you are grasping at straws now. But a worldwide control mechanism on ballistic missiles puts the entire world potentially at the mercy of the nation with the best pet hacker. No thanks.

It was fun, but I have nothing more to say on this.

 

[Chunko]

I consider this to be 1,000 times as accurate as the Mayan calendar. That is: I don't consider it accurate at all.

 

[Sofus]

That is one seriously impressive piece of technology right there...

Run for cover everyone, I am about to start my cars engine!

 

[Treblaine]

2007 = 5 minutes to "midnight" = Call of Duty 4 includes a plot element where a russian nuclear missile is launched at the United States and special operatives only are able to abort the missile at the last moment.


2011 = 5 minutes to "midnight" = Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol includes a plot element where a russian nuclear missile is launched at the United States and special operatives only are able to abort the missile at the last moment.

 

[Treblaine]

I think it was more happiness that the "most powerful nation on Earth" finally decided to elect a "mostly" black dude to president. Now we're only in the 19th century instead of the 18th! We'll catch up to the other 1st world countries yet!

But the clock is giant speculation at its finest.

"mostly" black? Who are you quoting? Other than yourself? He IS black. Race isn't done by fractions, it's done by inclusion.

And sorry, but name a black political leader how democratically held executive office in the 19th century? Or even a Black leader of a European country like France, Germany, UK or Spain? Not just in 19th century or 20th century but EVER! Have any European or other First-World countries elected a non-white leader? Did Canada ever have a black Prime Minister I didn't know about?

This is pretty much the first time a country of majority white people have elected a non-white person as their chief executive (prime minister/president/premier, etc). And it's all gone really well, there haven't been race riots or civil war. There has been consternation and political bickering but he got his health bill passed and mostly got his way in the end.

 

[k-ossuburb]

I feel this is relevant. Mostly because this song was playing in my head the whole time I was reading the article, but also because it's about the same thing.

 

[Signa]

Am I the only one that thought that the Doomsday Clock only existed in Watchmen?

Same here. It was an instantly explainable concept that I put no thought into it being a real thing.

OT: I'd be more concerned about the clock if the Mayan Calendar was taken into account. People are going to get insane at the end of the year, and while I doubt the Mayans knew what they were taking about, people might make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

[reeper4444]

I'll admit that I thought the doomsday clock was made up by 'Watchmen'.I didn't realize it actually existed

 

[Therumancer]

This is just ridiculous.

It was two minutes to midnight when the world was about to bomb each other into submission;
And it's five minutes to midnight when, aside from an ECONOMIC recession, everything is pretty alright.

What the fuck is 10 minutes to midnight? A world where people get along just fine?
What about 15 minutes to midnight? It that a world where everybody holds hands and frolics in the meadow?

Don't even get me started on 4PM, or as I like to call it, "8 hours to midnight."

Because Economic recession and Capital abuse are such tiny insignificant issues...

lol.

You know what?
You're right.

The world is probably going to end any minute now, all because of the recession.
I'm going to go hide in my bunker.

Actually almost all wars come down to economic reasons one way or another, especially today. Right now we face a situation where there are too many people and too few resources. We're literally destroying the planet in the pursuit of wood, metal, and other things, and we're not coming close to producing enough for the people currently on the planet to maintain anything close to the US standard of living, and if we increase production we wind up depleting the resources even further until we run out. With the global population increasing this makes things even worse.

A lot of people tend to bury their heads in the sand, but a lot of the current issues with say China come down to them wanting a higher standard of living for a country that consists of roughly 1/3rd of the world's population. As they demand things like better housing and to drive cars pressure put on the already fragile wood and oil production go even further. To compete for these resources China employs it's robber economy, sweatshop labour, and other things which are having a pronounced effect on the rest of the world, and nations like the US who go into recession when the stiffer competition and greater strain mean their domestic economy has trouble meeting it's own requirements.

Right now most people realize we have too many people on the planet but don't want to reduce the population due to "OMG, it involves killing human beings". Like similar times of global tension you see people building up larger militaries and making plans to go to war to meet their own needs. China for example has been working on it's Navy and the abillity to project it's huge population into other countries offensively, it's also been working on systems to blind US satellites to reduce the threat of MAD from first world nations like the US if it DOES decide to invade. There is plenty of saber rattling if you read the right stuff about China wanting to colonize other countries for "living space", justified by a combination of racial supremacy, and payback for "slights" going back to the Opium wars and even further.

The point here isn't to argue geo-politics, simply to say that I agree with you and the guy your responding to both it seems. Like it or not the world is a powder keg, and despite what merchants and business interests always say, economics are a reason for wars, not something that prevents them. After all the Romans believed they were invincible because of how central they were to trade and how they maintain the roads, they were in denial right as the barbarians assembled outside the gates and tore them down. Hence the saying "Barbarians At The Gates" for being willfully ignorant and oblivious to the obvious.


That said for those that read this far, the "Doomsday Clock" started out as a good idea, but rapidly became too political for it to matter. Barak Obama for example should have moved the clock closer, not further away, not so much beause he's a bad guy, but because those same apparent tendencies that "filled people with hope" meant he wasn't aggressive enough to maintain the peace. Right now the big threats that have a chance of ending the world, or the world as we know it, like China, have continued to grow. China has grown more militarily powerful, not less, and we've been doing very little to try and curtail their development
in a practical sense.

On the other hand the "Clock" has become too heavily tied to WMD (which is ironic given when and why it was created). Right now WMD disarmament is more of a political position than anything. WMD if anything has helped preserve the peace as long as we've had it, and really the biggest threat to the world right now are WMD countermeasures, like the missle interception abillity the has demonstrated and which slotted off the Russians due to treaties with the now-defunct USSR, and China's satellite blinding systems (do a search for Satellite, Lasers, China, or Chinese Anti-Satellite Lasers).

Right now the big threats are wars over economics and living space, with WMD being irrelevent due to countermeasures terrorism and conventional warfare rises, huge overpopulated countries who can mount huge armies and deliver the navally (like China)
become the major threat, and while we do see WMD used they wind up having to be delivered at relatively close range. Hypothetically things like huge scale EMP, and Biological and chemical weapons are going to be the big things that do in humanity as opposed to
traditional Atomic weapons.

As odd as it sounds I'd probably put us as closer to two minutes to midnight on the clock, and argue that ironically military action to remove certain developing threats would move it back.

As far as the Aztecs go... I'm hoping we're about to see the birth of Shadowrun for real, I look forward to my future existance as an Elven battle mage.