We’ve been here before.
This time last year, in fact, when the Doomsday Clock was set at 89 seconds to midnight.
Well, now it’s set at 85 seconds to midnight. 4 seconds closer to oblivion. Oh no.
And look, I get it. The world is in an absolutely terrible state. And I’d definitely argue that it’s worse than it was this time last year. But 4 seconds worse?
Yawn.
Yep. I said it last year, and I’m saying it again now:
Look, I get that in a day with 86,400 seconds, being just 89 from complete destruction isn’t a great place to be. But then also, looking at things another way, we started just 420 seconds away from annihilation back in 1947, and we’ve only ever been 17 minutes away at our very safest.
See, they’ve gone in all too dramatic, and now they have no wiggle room at all.
OK, so they moved four seconds this year, and not one. But even at that rate, we’ve got decades before we all go up in a big puff of smoke and radiation.
Once again, I am calling for a reset of the Doomsday Clock. Think of it like decimalisation hitting the UK in 1971, or the introduction of the Euro in 1999 (and 2002). Because at the moment, the Doomsday Clock is pointless. The constant attempts to drag the time down as low as possible for dramatic purposes means that it not longer has any value.
They messed up when they started. They should have given us an hour or two to work with, but they didn’t. And so we need to start again at quarter to midnight (or even earlier) and we need to get the Prima Donnas off the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Committee so that we can have meaningful annual updates which might actually bang some heads together and make some difference.
No-one cares about ninety or eighty-nine or eighty-five seconds. Give them some decent numbers that we can then drastically reduce when Trump tries to take Greenland.
Assuming that we’re all still around next year to review it again, of course.