It’s 89 seconds to midnight. It’s the closest that humanity has ever been to self-wrought extinction (well, since 1947, anyway). At least, that’s what the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is telling us, anyway. They’re the ones that get to inform us about where The Doomsday Clock is sitting this year.
And what exactly is The Doomsday Clock?
The Doomsday Clock is a design that warns the public about how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making. It is a metaphor, a reminder of the perils we must address if we are to survive on the planet.
And 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. And then add to that, the fact that we’ve “only” moved one second towards complete obliteration in this year’s update:
In setting the Clock one second closer to midnight, the Science and Security Board sends a stark signal: Because the world is already perilously close to the precipice, a move of even a single second should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster.
Yep. Awful. But then, this also suggests that we could keep going at the frankly horrendous rates of killing each other and destroying the environment that we’ve been working so hard upon for the last 12 months for at least another 88 years, and we’ll still be ok. Just.
See, they’ve gone in all too dramatic, and now they have no wiggle room at all.
If they’d started back in 1947 with an hour instead of seven minutes, it would mostly have been fine. They could have knocked off a few minutes here and there, added on a few when things were looking better. The only issue with this approach would likely have been that people would have looked at the thing and basically not given a toss. So sure, there needed to be a bit of drama in there, I get it.
But they went in too hard, too soon. And now we’re all supposed to be scared over a 1.11% increase in the likelihood of self-inflicted destruction? Nope.
Look at the warnings that The Doomsday Clock is sending us, and look at mankind’s reaction.
I’m calling for a reset of The Doomsday Clock: stick it back to 15 minutes to midnight or something so that we can actually move the hands a significant distance and see where we actually stand when there are important developments one way or the other.
Although, honestly, they’re really only likely to go one way, right?
Because a second here or there is really not going to put us on edge and give us the wake-up call that we so clearly need. In fact, it might take actual planetary ruination before someone important (and no, it won’t be him) pipes up and starts wondering if we should do (or should have done) something to stop it all.
Tick tock.