Why do we have the Doomsday Clock?

Image via Wikipedia

For those of you looking forward to what continually seems to be the impending apocalypse, you might have to just wait a minute. Or, at least a minute longer than you might have in 2007.

From the Guardian:

Today the Doomsday Clock was moved by scientists to a metaphorical six minutes, back from its previous five minutes.

In 2007 the clock was moved to five minutes due to the looming threat of climate change and nuclear proliferation. Wow, how things have changed. We’re so much more advanced and beyond that in 2010. Because Copenhagen was a failure success! And this:

Stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and corralling components for a dirty bomb terror attack is fast becoming Canada’s top agenda item for the G8 summit it will host this summer. – The Globe and Mail, January 4, 2010

Hrm.

The Guardian’s section on the Doomsday Clock is interesting, but a couple of things came to mind when I was flipping through the featured years.

First, I noticed that the closest we’ve come to midnight was apparently 2 minutes, in 1953, when the U.S. and the USSR both tested thermonuclear devices only nine months apart. Fair enough – seems like a good time to hover a finger over the panic button. But then, in 1962, weren’t we actually a lot closer to calling it a civilization? Surely the Cuban Missile Crisis would have pushed the Clock to at least 2 minutes, if not 1? As far as I can tell, the Cuban Missile Crisis didn’t seem to affect the clock. Maybe because at the time, those in charge of it were too busy securing themselves in an underground bunker somewhere to worry about a stupid, theoretical clock.

Second, why do we have this thing? Generally, I get the idea: To put a general consensus/warning from some from Earth’s brightest people into the ether as a reminder of just how close we can come to destroying ourselves. It’s an appeal to reason and rationality, and for that, I love it. But on the other hand, moving the hands of a Doomsday Clock might actually encourage the opposite. If, for example, it had moved a minute closer to midnight, well…

You can imagine the response, especially on the Internet, a medium that, to put it mildly, is so obsessed with the destruction of the entire human race that if it were to have a Doomday Clock of its own, it would be permanently set somewhere between 11:59:30 and 11:59:59. In other words, the Doomsday Clock is mostly irrelevant – the Internet has taken over, and as far as its concerned, we left rational thinking under a pile of coats in the silo, and now we’re collectively riding a warhead, bareback and swinging a cowboy hat over our head, as we plummet to the End.