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| The Doomsday Clock |
The clock first came into existence in 1947 after World War II when the hands were set to seven minutes to midnight. In 1953, the clock was set to two minutes in response to the Cold War. As seen in the big reveal, the clock is yet again set to two minutes because of the threat of nuclear war and climate change. Oddly, the hands were positioned to the less ominous time of seven minutes during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the Soviets parked a shitload of nuclear warheads 300 miles off the Florida coast. In September of 2001, when terrorist took down the Twin Towers, killing 3000 people, the clock remained unchanged at seven minutes. Do scientists really think that things today are as bad as in the past?
I'm old enough to recall the "duck and cover" drills in grade school when scientists advised us to crawl under our desks and hide our eyes from an atomic blast. In those days, the evening news was filled with unedited combat footage of our troops during the Vietnam War. Later, interest rates on mortgages were double digits and 52 Americans were held hostage in Iran for over 400 days, all while the Doomsday Clock hung above seven minutes. Things sucked back then as compared to today, but now, the brain trust of society feels that things are about to implode.
The Doomsday Clock is like the Weasley Clock from the Harry Potter series which monitored the state of each member of the Weasley family with settings for "home," "school," "work," "lost," "prison," and "mortal peril." By always setting the clock to "pending doom," the eggheads who comb through the vast input in search of perils and portend, have really no place to go. Crying wolf is never an immediate concern. The only thing that could possibly make the Doomsday Clock less relevant is if the board of science nerds vote to change it to a watch. Sure, these geeks are solemn about the Doomsday Clock because for most of the ‘70’s they were unrelentingly bullied by jocks. A lot of these Nobel Laureates experienced atomic wedgies in high school gym class, which probably felt like one long doomsyear for them. It's no wonder that they're a bunch of downers.
Maybe the scientists might consider modernizing their catastrophic foreshadowing symbol by changing it from an analog to a digital clock. After all, whole generations don’t know how to tell time by reading the hands on an analog clock which puts them at a serious disadvantage when preparing for worldwide decimation. Also, the analogy of the big hand pointing before twelve is confusing. How do we know the Doomsday Clock is actually not reading just before noon? Everyone knows that the first thing that happens during an apocalypse is that they cancel lunch.
I think a better representation of doomsday is the National Debt Clock which is currently well over $21 trillion dollars. I became aware of the staggering national debt back in the early '80's by the award winning journalist, John Stossel, on the investigative news show, 20/20. Stossel did a piece indicating that half of our tax dollars went out to entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid, government pensions, welfare etc., with 10% going to interest on the debt. He reported that the funds left over to run the government were steadily shrinking each year. Today, entitlements eat up about 70% of the federal budget. The recent government shutdown which put 800,000 federal workers on furlough forebodes the inevitable financial meltdown which will occur far sooner than rising sea levels.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists puts out a lengthy statement describing how unchecked technology led to the current setting of the Doomsday Clock. Ironically, the written declaration from these dorks is devoid of any actual peer reviewed, research data. In a few decades, a fiscal cataclysm will be upon us based on the government's long history of unbounded entitlements and unchecked spending.
You don't need to be a Nobel Laureate to see that day coming.
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