Galena
Silver and Lead
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2013
- Messages
- 3,786
- Enneagram
- 4w5
- Instinctual Variant
- sx/so
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...
...what is the Doomsday Clock?
...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.
...what is the Doomsday Clock?
Link to full articleThe '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.â€
...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.