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Saturday 16 December 2023

Clock Watchers



How close is the Doomsday Clock to midnight in 2023?

As 2023 comes to a close many of us are thinking about what the New Year has in store, and according to the Doomsday Clock, it's nothing great.

At 90 seconds to midnight, the Doomsday Clock is the closest it's ever been to midnight.

The Doomsday Clock is set by members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and is designed to show how close humanity is to global catastrophe caused by manmade technologies.

Prior to January this year, the previous record was 100 seconds to midnight for two years. The farther time from midnight was 17 minutes in 1991.


It is curiously reassuring that there are still enough doomster-loons to keep this media stunt going. I thought it must have stopped, but apparently it still ticks on. It seems able to tick backwards too, so maybe climate change has affected the works. Or Brexit. Or Covid.


Life has surely hardships enough that are inevitable without gratuitously adding the hardship of absolute government, administered by a clock?

Wilkie Collins – Man and Wife (1870)

3 comments:

Sam Vega said...

Interesting how "atomic scientists" are such experts on all man-made threats. Learn about quarks, and you also master global warming, pollution, international relations, epidemics, gene therapy, radiation, etc, etc...

DiscoveredJoys said...

For the sake of the economy the light at the end of the tunnel has been switched off - but the power to the doomsday clock came from the same circuit so now the clock has stopped we are all saved.

A K Haart said...

Sam - plus the dangers of cultural decline, official incompetence, inflation and so on. Formidable people who also know how to fix stopped clocks of course.

DJ - phew! Luckily there isn't a single electrician among them.