Doomsday Clock Stays at 90 Seconds To Midnight (bbc.com) 61
Tony Isaac writes: The doomsday clock remains at 90 seconds to midnight, the same as last year. Interestingly, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists added 'AI' to the list of threats that they consider to be existential threats to humanity, but didn't move the hands of the clock as a result of adding that threat. My take is that they consider AI to be a very low-grade threat, but it makes me wonder why they included it at all.
Party hard (Score:1)
then pull an all-nighter.
Speak for yourself (Score:1, Troll)
I, for one, am really scared that the clock is pegged at 90 seconds before midnight.
I mean, really, really, really scared.
Does anyone have any idea what this means, that the hands are at 90 seconds before midnight?
I don't either, but I remain scared.
Re: Speak for yourself (Score:2)
It means it's almost midnight.
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Oh wait, that's supposed to show how worried I am about the "state of the world", humanly, and all?
* The world (Earth) will be fine, it always will be. (ignoring that in 3B years when the Sun expands and eats it, but once again that's predictable.)
* Humanity? We'll live but some won't; things will change
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I'm a night owl. MIDNIGHT?!!? That's for wimps.
As Lister once said on Red Dwarf: "I get up at the crack of ... noon."
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Like Zeno's Paradox, the publicity-whoring "Atomic Scientists" can only keep themselves in the news by pushing the clock in ever-decreasing intervals towards midnight.
I can see the headlines twenty years from now: "The Doomsday Clock is now 500 milliseconds bef
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Re: Speak for yourself (Score:1)
Strange things are afoot at the circle K. Ted donâ(TM)t forget to wind your watch.
Why does anyone care? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Doomsday Clock is just a political attention whore stunt. Only by complete coincidence could it have any relation to a future civilization-ending scenario.
Re: Why does anyone care? (Score:2)
Dr Manhattan had some choice words:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=HZ... [youtube.com]
(Though you'll have to forgive him for wearing blackface in the sequel series.)
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Completely off-topic, but that was the one plot hole in the Watchmen that I could not get past. Dr. Manhattan can rearrange molecules at a whim, and he can't cure cancer? He knows his own future, but he's surprised by the media ambush?
It makes absolutely no sense. Never did.
Re: Why does anyone care? (Score:2)
Re: Why does anyone care? (Score:2)
It's not a plot hole, it's deliberate. He does that all throughout the movie. Recall his reaction to the comedian killing his Vietnamese concubine, and then afterwards talked about how Manhattan already saw it coming and did nothing anyways. Another example is on Mars, Manhattan calmly told spectre that she was about to tell him that she cheated on him, then he has a strong emotional reaction after she does so.
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I took it as the author making fun of the concept of deus ex machina. What happens when the deity in the play decides to do nothing?
Re: Why does anyone care? (Score:2)
And now we know :)
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There are a few stories that will always make it onto Slashdot, every single year (or more often):
- Microsoft has really screwed up the latest version of Windows (Windows 7 was awesome, why did they have to change it?)
- Is this (finally) the year of the Linux Desktop?
- Daylight Saving Time is so stupid!
- Apple is so amazing / greedy / out of touch
- AI is so amazing / unimpressive / scary
- The Doomsday Clock is really scarily close to midnight this year!
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It's a clock with a 12-hr face that's always in a 10-minute range, eh?
Maybe this scared somebody in 1972 but it's just cringe now.
They predict more imminent disasters than Alex Jones and call themselves scientists.
Wait - maybe their work has a 100% success rate at stopping doom at the last minute!
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They predict more imminent disasters
They do nothing of the sort, which is why you have that opinion of them. A risk assessment is not a prediction of imminence, it's a prediction of likelihood.
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They predict more imminent disasters
They do nothing of the sort, which is why you have that opinion of them. A risk assessment is not a prediction of imminence, it's a prediction of likelihood.
Don't confuse people with technicalities. We need to rail against the doomer scientists, before we move on to the next article where we all talk about how close we are to the end of the world.
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Excactly!
There is no such thing as a doomsday clock outside of Futurama. It nothing but a groups political opinions and biases represented on a clock to get likes etc.
If they were really worried it would already be at midnight, why? Because we could be wiped out by an asteroid at any moment with only a few mins notice if we are lucky.
We barely watch the sky and the rocks we miss are out there right now.
Several times we have been surprised in recent years.
Trauma for Breakfast (Score:2)
PTSD for Lunch.
As far as performative art goes, this piece has lost most of its impact except to the least jaded of us to which the phrase "doomsday clock" means whatever their imaginations can conjure.
Re: "The Beating of a Liberal" (Score:2)
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His clock is also stuck.
Somewhat-disruptive Clock (Score:2)
My take is that they consider AI to be a very low-grade threat, but it makes me wonder why they included it at all.
I wonder why they still bother with this at all. The only current existential threat to humanity at the moment that we have any control over remains nuclear war. Climate change and AI may well cause disruption but are nowhere near the level of an existential threat to humanity.
It's not a doomsday clock if the threats you are considering are not existential.
Re:Somewhat-disruptive Clock (Score:5, Interesting)
The original Doomsday Clock imagined nuclear winter brought on by thousands of atomic explosions. Today's third-world nuclear-armed countries have nowhere near enough warheads to disrupt the entire world ecosystem. Even today, only the US has that, and maybe Russia, though I doubt if more than 10% of their warheads are actually operational.
As for the other threats, I agree, they are totally losing sight of what the Doomsday Clock is really about. They've been so busy finding reasons to move the hands closer to midnight in an effort to justify their goals, that the hands have become totally disconnected from reality.
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Now instead imagine that one of those "third-world countries" initiated a cyber attack on Russia that led to it launching one or more warheads at the US, and at the same time initiating an attack on China that led to it launching against Taiwan.
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That's a dramatic imagination, indeed.
Russia's nuclear arsenal was built primarily in the 1950s. That equipment is now 70+ years old, well before the internet caught on, and has most has likely not been updated since. To connect those triggers to the internet (a stupid thing to do), they would have had to re-engineer the trigger mechanisms.
What are the chances that the equipment is still in operating condition, much less internet-connected!
Yes, there are scary scenarios. We saw one of those when the Twin To
Re: Somewhat-disruptive Clock (Score:3)
You don't seem to understand how most cyber attacks work. There is no need whatsoever for a system to be connected to the internet to be subject to a cyber attack. Many cyber attacks leverage physical ingress. Stuxnet is one major well known example but there are countless others.
What's more... why bother with this when all you really need to do is take over the CNC and forge orders...
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Stuxnet worked because the Iranian centrifuges were computer-controlled. It is highly unlikely that 1950's-era missiles are computer-controlled.
And Stuxnet required a lot more money (about $1 billion) and expertise to carry out than most third-world countries have available for such attacks. https://grahamcluley.com/stuxn... [grahamcluley.com].
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Your scenario is one that makes a good movie plot line, for sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I assume mutually assured destruction is still a thing?
As you say, it's an assumption. Russia would like us to believe that they still have the capability to launch a large portion of their nuclear arsenal. Judging by their performance in Ukraine, I suspect the vast majority are inoperable, and Russia doesn't have the money to repair them.
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Iron Maiden (Score:1)
Stays at 90 Seconds To Midnight (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps someone forgot to wind it.
No it's 9 months until doomsday (Score:3)
Re:No it's 9 months until doomsday (Score:4, Informative)
If you haven't noticed that for years, the hands only advance when a Republican is in office, you just ain't paying attention!
Exactly! Except for the first time, and the second time, and the third time, and the fifth time, and the sixth time, and the eight time, and ninth time, and the twelfth time, and the thirteenth time, and...
There's probably a Republican in office right now, cause it's happened again!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
90 seconds to 5 o'clock, somewhere (Score:2)
A good way to wind it back is to refrain from electing idiots who think a lot of half-assed half-way foreign wars are somehow better than one real one, or at least the very credible threat of one.
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A good way to wind it back is to refrain from electing idiots who think a lot of half-assed half-way foreign wars are somehow better than one real one, or at least the very credible threat of one.
As if Putin's election was a legitimate reflection of public opinion.
Scary when I was a child (Score:1, Insightful)
I was about 8 the first time I heard about the doomsday clock. Terrifying!
Then I grew up.
Is there anyone over age 12 who finds any value in this stupid yearly ritual?
And how useful is a clock that does random shit? In a year it moves ahead a few seconds or does nothing or even goes backwards sometimes! Stupid.
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I was about 8 the first time I heard about the doomsday clock. Terrifying!
Then I grew up.
Is there anyone over age 12 who finds any value in this stupid yearly ritual?
Sometimes reading up on their reasoning for moving or not moving the clock gives me some great fiction fodder.
And how useful is a clock that does random shit? In a year it moves ahead a few seconds or does nothing or even goes backwards sometimes! Stupid.
It was an interesting concept back during the nuclear scare days. Now it's just one of those things that happens that nobody's ever going to stop because they've been doing it so long. I don't find it to be a particularly relevant metric of any sort, but see no reason to waste the energy that some do getting all angry about it. People do a lot of dumb shit. If this committee wants to do some stupid
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> People do a lot of dumb shit. If this committee wants to do some stupid shit and wave it around in public to show everybody? Pat them on the head, and move on.
Good point.
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I, for one, welcome our robotic overlords (Score:2)
They wouldn't use a clock that's been stuck at quarter to midnight for the past 70 years.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
Counterproductive (Score:3)
I think the intentions behind things like the Doomsday clock are good, it's meant to draw attention to some of the threats we're facing. However the overdramatic nature of that stuff makes it counterproductive to that goal. People stop taking you seriously, and then they start listening to "we don't need no experts" and "it's all scaremongering" type of people. What scientists should be doing is describing threats in an accurate, objective, dispassionate and, well, scientific manner. It's what they're good at.
It's like people who claim that global warming will lead to humanity's extinction. As things stang it looks like a lot of people will die and others will live, but not as well as they used to, but humanity as a whole and human civilization will certainly survive. Unless some weird feedback loop is triggered, but that seems very unlikely as far as I understand. Predicting the end of humanity just makes you look like a loon and pushes people towards the "it's all just a bit of weather" shills.
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I think the intentions behind things like the Doomsday clock are good
In what way? It's always a bunch of crusty people whom you've never heard of gathered around the clock and looking solemn for the inevitable group photo for the media. You wouldn't give a shit about their opinions if you met any of them in a coffee shop.
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Well as long as we're being sscientific about it (Score:2)
...and the sword of Damocles... (Score:2, Redundant)
Is this really all that different from those insular religious sects the prophecise the end of the world & sometimes end up committing mass suicides? Somebody should intervene. Make sure they're all OK.
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That's a great point. Maybe somebody should check the Kool-Aid they were drinking.
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...is still held aloft by but thin, tenuous thread. At what moment shall we all perish?! Is this really all that different from those insular religious sects the prophecise the end of the world & sometimes end up committing mass suicides? Somebody should intervene. Make sure they're all OK.
The doomsday clock was an interesting concept when the entire world wasn't saturated with doomers. Now it comes across as a bunch of out-of-touch tag-alongs on the doomsday stage, as there are doomers spouting doom in our faces 24/7 from every direction.
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Contradictions of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist (Score:2, Interesting)
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a contradictory organization, they want to be rid of nuclear weapons and also be rid of nuclear power. Well, now that this genie is out of the bottle there's no putting it back.
Once weapon grade plutonium is created it is difficult to destroy by any means other than neutron bombardment. Plutonium will decay away in time, but a very long time. Of the different series of decay chains Pu-239 is on the shortest one but that just means we can't find much of it in nature on
Ho hum. (Score:2)
Ho hum. Let me know when it's half past. I have an appt at 1:00.
Cuban Missile Crisis (Score:3)
So right now the doomsday clock is closer to midnight than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis (when it was at 7 minutes)?
Excuse me if I don't take it very seriously.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/ar... [spectator.co.uk]