Summary
The “Doomsday Clock” has been moved to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
The group cited threats including climate change, nuclear proliferation, the war in Ukraine, pandemics, and the integration of AI into military operations.
Concerns about cooperation between Russia, China, and North Korea on nuclear programs and the potential use of nuclear weapons by Russia were highlighted.
The group urged global leaders to collaborate in addressing existential threats to reverse the clock’s progression.
Really? Closer than Cuban missile crisis? I’ll grant you climate change might warrant it, since that’s a slow moving thing that possibly is already passed the point of no return for feedback loops. I’m not sweating nuclear war or pandemics.
I guess most people heard that climate change’s worst part will happen once they’re gone so they stopped caring.
We just had a pandemic and bozo over there just turned off HIV meds for the poor around the world. Bozo also happens to have the nuclear codes for a good price. And you think this is not worse? I can’t help the situation but it is worse.
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The basically changed the scale in the 90’s when everyone thought history was over, and announced as much. This is like maybe nine minutes on the old scale.
Oh I never knew that!
Yeah. To be clear, I don’t know if they called it a scale change, but “we need to start considering more, weaker crises because there aren’t big ones anymore” was the gist.
Oh I guess that makes sense in a post superpower era. Everything became smaller proxy conflicts.
To be clear, the thinking at the time was more like an eternal one-superpower era. There was a guy who literally wrote an essay called “The End Of History?” that basically talked about less and less conflict happening, and everything gradually becoming a capitalist democracy in the image of the US.
The assumption is that any major war => nuclear war => major unmitigated disaster.
And we are dangerously close to a global war. Personally I have a hunch that’s the reason Trump is more or less going nuclear at home with all of his changes. They’re gonna wreck the economy but it’s all gonna be overshadowed quite soon so it won’t matter.