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Doomsday Clock Prediction (read the OP before voting)

Your Prediction

  • Other high - explained in the thread (or not)

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 3 minutes to midnight

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 2.5 minutes to midnight

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • .5 minutes to midnight

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    8

Galena

Silver and Lead
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This is to share a New Year's tradition with you that I follow each year. My excuse for putting it here rather than in Current Events is that this subforum has an atom symbol for its icon. Anyway...


images


...what is the Doomsday Clock?
The 'Pedia said:
The Doomsday Clock is a symbol which represents the likelihood of a man-made global catastrophe. Maintained since 1947 by the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board, the clock represents an analogy for the threat of global nuclear war. Since 2007, it has also reflected climate change and new developments in the life sciences and technology that could inflict irrevocable harm to humanity.

The clock represents the hypothetical global catastrophe as "midnight" and The Bulletin's opinion on how close the world is to a global catastrophe as a number of "minutes" to midnight. Its original setting in 1947 was seven minutes to midnight. It has been set backward and forward 23 times since then, the smallest-ever number of minutes to midnight being two (in 1953 and 2018) and the largest seventeen (in 1991). As of January 2018, the clock is set at two minutes to midnight, due to "the looming threats of nuclear war and climate change.”
Link to full article


...how do I vote in the poll?
This is the part that it was important to read first: vote for where you think the hand of the Doomsday Clock will be set this coming January 2019.

Will is the operative word. You might have your own opinion of where the clock should be or how the scale is broken, and nothing is stopping you from posting about it. In fact, go for it (politely - I would be ashamed to be the parent of a thread with a modding record). But your vote/prediction is not meant to be about what you think, but about what you think the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will think. Your objective is to guess this right, so that I might award you some kind of morbid glitter gif in a month. If it wouldn't get my account frozen in carbonite, this would be a betting pool.

It might help your prediction to read the documentation from the Clock's home website, such as these main pages:

Current Time
FAQ
Timeline

Or, to do some extra research that only you can imagine.


...what is YOUR vote? Contribute to your own thread for once.
I'm going to say one and a half minutes to midnight, whenever they're going to set it in January (seems like later in January). This is going off the recent trend of squeezing consistent downward motion into the lowest few minutes by introducing fractions of minutes, and figuring that it's not going to change yet. If the overarching issues that impacted this for 2018 have snapped into a new direction, I've either failed to hear the snap or underestimated it. There's a lot of tension in the air.

Maybe that checks out for you, too. On the other hand, I totally deserve for someone to make me regret my tepid and shallow vote. Do you think so? Heads up that if you enjoy debating, I dislike doing it over text, so if you try to engage me that way, my response may bore you - try someone else who likes it. But, I am really really curious to read what other people may think about this, am open to letting it impact my thoughts, and promise not to stay silent.
 

Virtual ghost

Complex paradigm
Joined
Jun 6, 2008
Messages
19,769
This is a bad way to think about this.
If nuclear war is going to happen it will happen suddenly before diplomacy and UN can do something about it. So 2 minutes to midnight or 3 minutes to midnight ... it doesn't really say anything about the real world, since surprise factor is key element of the story. Especially since it can offer strategic advantage.


While climate change is a slow and creeping problem that wouldn't destroy the world but it will destroy the world as we know it on the most fundamental level. So placing this to the same mix with nuclear war isn't the most logical course of thinking about this. This requires separate clock.


Sorry for party pooping.
 

Galena

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This is a bad way to think about this.
If nuclear war is going to happen it will happen suddenly before diplomacy and UN can do something about it. So 2 minutes to midnight or 3 minutes to midnight ... it doesn't really say anything about the real world, since surprise factor is key element of the story. Especially since it can offer strategic advantage.


While climate change is a slow and creeping problem that wouldn't destroy the world but it will destroy the world as we know it on the most fundamental level. So placing this to the same mix with nuclear war isn't the most logical course of thinking about this. This requires separate clock.


Sorry for party pooping.
Nah, absolutely on topic. It's pretty clearly not perfect and becoming weirder recently as a measure, despite the appeal as a metaphor. Becoming dated could be an issue.
 

Virtual ghost

Complex paradigm
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Jun 6, 2008
Messages
19,769

Bush

cute lil war dog
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If we're guessing what they're thinking... gun to my head, I'd say 1.5. You could copy and paste their 2018 bulletin and basically have described our landscape now. Same types of stories. Nothing has significantly accelerated, but things definitely haven't been fixed.

Some of their recent articles give some hints on their thoughts too:

This is not a drill: Lessons from the false Hawaiian missile alert - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

The blinders on the US nuclear policy establishment - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
 

raskol

New member
Joined
Jan 10, 2019
Messages
220
The doomsday clock trope is a leftover from the Cold War, carried by the inherently flawed MAD doctrine. It's not as prevalent in our current paradigm, and I would place it second to extreme weather conditions brought about by climate change. For insights into contemporary and future doomsday scenarios, I recommend Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence.

And yes, I voted other low.
 

Sundae

New member
Joined
Dec 8, 2018
Messages
98
MBTI Type
INFP
Y2K
oh wait....

6/06/2006
oh wait...

11/11/11
oh wait...

1/1/2012
oh wait....
 

Virtual ghost

Complex paradigm
Joined
Jun 6, 2008
Messages
19,769
Y2K
oh wait....

6/06/2006
oh wait...

11/11/11
oh wait...

1/1/2012
oh wait....


Wrong thread.

One thing is supernatural end of the entire universe and quite another is the end of Earth's surface as we know it, since the nuclear treaty/deal between the two nuclear superpowers is suspended.
 
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