Vacate the premises

January 26, 2021 2:16 PM

The Doomsday Clock will be unveiled again, tomorrow. How did it come to be?
posted by cashman (33 comments total)

The Doomsday Clock is located at the Bulletin offices at 1307 E. 60th St., in in the lobby of the Keller Center, home to the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

I didn’t know there was a real clock - fascinating.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:24 PM on January 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

Honestly, I feel like the doomsday clock is silly theater and distracts from the issues it represents/trivializes them. I say this as someone who reached the age of reason during the 'end of history.'
posted by es_de_bah at 2:29 PM on January 26, 2021 [12 favorites]

Obviously you didn’t since somehow we’re still like 2 1/2 whole minutes from the end of history.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 2:33 PM on January 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

It’s like the clock at the end of the school day. Wait, did it just tick backwards???
posted by Huffy Puffy at 2:33 PM on January 26, 2021 [5 favorites]

Wait, so is this clock purporting to measure the proximity of nuclear war, catastrophic climate change, or fascist takeover of the U.S. by the Republican Party?
posted by PhineasGage at 2:41 PM on January 26, 2021

When I was in high school, we one year went on a field trip to the press conference where they do this thing, for my AP history class. I feel like they set it to 14 minutes to midnight that year or something thereabouts.

In case you wonder where the audience (in non-Covid years) comes from. Very bored high school students who were forced to wear dressy clothes!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 2:46 PM on January 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

It was created in 1947. Unfortunately it's a little bit like Sagan's Cosmic Calendar in the sense that it is trying to frame these massive amounts of time as though they are very short and quick passages of time.

It works as an illustrative point, but 74 years on, the number of times it has been ticked back and move forward do indeed begin to feel like theater that trivializes the real issues.

Also, just the sense of it being a "clock" that counts down to "doomsday" sounds so much like freaking comic books from the 1940's. If anything, this illustrative point needs an update that fits the modern world better than this.
posted by deadaluspark at 2:51 PM on January 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

Wait, so is this clock purporting to measure the proximity of nuclear war, catastrophic climate change, or fascist takeover of the U.S. by the Republican Party?

Interestingly, there are circulating rumors that a 300-man militia attack against DC targets (aided by NatGuard members no less) is scheduled to go down tomorrow, as well. The same day as the new Doomsday Clock is to be unveiled. Coincidence? Hmmmmm...
posted by Thorzdad at 2:53 PM on January 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

If anything, this illustrative point needs an update that fits the modern world better than this.

Here, free of charge, is my brilliant suggestion. Gotta pay a license fee to TPIR, but at least the song is probably in the public domain.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 3:08 PM on January 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

Is the clock not an effective symbol, or are we just fucking nuts to have come this short distance in history, armed with weapons that can destroy most life on earth in moments, and that is just the way shit goes.

I'm trying to think of a symbol that somehow *wouldn't* be casually disparaged some 70 years later. I don't think there's much wrong with a Doomsday Clock, but there is something weird with our capacity to create these things, and live with them.. and even forget about them.
posted by elkevelvet at 3:10 PM on January 26, 2021 [5 favorites]

TIL that the "peace" symbol is a superposition of the semaphore symbols for "N" (nuclear) and "D" (disarmament).
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 3:21 PM on January 26, 2021 [5 favorites]

I hope that, to show that we shouldn't get complacent, they wind it back... by one second. A hundred and one seconds to midnight.
posted by BiggerJ at 4:16 PM on January 26, 2021

Coincidence? Hmmmmm...

Perhaps you meant to write 'Qincidence?'

Hmmmmm..
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 6:33 PM on January 26, 2021

I don't think there's much wrong with a Doomsday Clock

The entire point of a clock is that it's only useful if it runs at a known and constant rate.

If we wanted a metaphor for clear and present risk, seems to me that Cliff Edge of Doom Speed and Distance would have worked much better.
posted by flabdablet at 9:07 PM on January 26, 2021 [4 favorites]

Maybe this is the year the Bulletin of the Atmospheric Scientists will finally unveil their competing Doomsday Barometer
posted by oulipian at 9:32 PM on January 26, 2021 [9 favorites]

I barter the Doomsday Barometer to the Doomsday Doorman, obviously.
posted by away for regrooving at 2:11 AM on January 27, 2021 [4 favorites]

All y'all who are pooh-poohing the clock -

Are y'all secretly trying to cover up the fact that you don't know how to read an analog clock any more or something?.....That's the only thing I can think for not understanding the symbolism inherent in "how close we are to Doomsday".

Why is a clock not a good enough symbol for you? Or do you think that we don't need periodic reminders of "we're close to being in the shit and we'd better shape up"?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:15 AM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think that it had a bit more heft as symbolism when, say, the Cuban Missile Crisis happened less than twenty years after the first atomic bomb detonation. We've lived with it so long that we've become inured to it. Even Watchmen, which traded heavily on the symbolism of the doomsday clock, was published about thirty-five years ago.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:35 AM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

Why is a clock not a good enough symbol for you?

Mainly because time until doom is a really crappy metaphor for risk of doom. Also because pondering how close we are to properly fucked is an unhelpful distraction from the actual issues we need to address in order not to get properly fucked.

We can imagine roughly what doom looks like, along multiple axes of doom; so the sensible response to that is to keep on making public policy choices that take our present circumstances further from, rather than closer to, doom on all of those axes at once. Trying to smoosh them all together into one simple scalar measure of risk is just not helpful.

If it was a proper clock then we'd be heading inexorably toward doom and the choices we make just wouldn't matter much. But people keep fiddling with the hands. A clock that bounces around randomly from 23:58 to 23:43 and back is frankly not a useful instrument.

If we truly must be so reductive as to need one single arbitrarily-smooshed-together number to remind us all how close to fucked we are, a Doomsday Barometer would be a much better metaphor.
posted by flabdablet at 4:50 AM on January 27, 2021 [8 favorites]

A Doomsday Spoons Gauge would be even better. We could even use the same numbers.
posted by flabdablet at 5:01 AM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think we should all collectively listen to Iron Maiden once a year.

Anyway, I’m glad we’re yelling about symbolism again.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 5:18 AM on January 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

> A clock that bounces around randomly from 23:58 to 23:43 and back is frankly not a useful instrument.

Even a doomsday clock is right twice a day.
posted by davelog at 6:35 AM on January 27, 2021 [5 favorites]

I appreciate this post. I appreciate the 70+ year effort to try to quantify the risk of the destruction of human civilization, an imperfect symbol for an imperfect world where existential risks like nuclear weapons, asteroids, climate change and pandemics are too often ignored.

I don't know that I appreciate all the snark here though.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 6:59 AM on January 27, 2021 [6 favorites]

No Change in the doomsday clock, still 100 seconds to midnight.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 7:13 AM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

Unchanged, still 100 seconds til.

Don't blame them.
posted by davelog at 7:13 AM on January 27, 2021

I'll only rely on a Doomsday Clock if it measures units of time in Scaramuccis.
posted by PhineasGage at 8:21 AM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

We don't need a Doomsday clock, we need a Doomsday Thermometer!
posted by Tom-B at 9:04 AM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

Ok, barometer is a good metaphor for describing how much the problem is pressing.

But the clock has a clear meaning to this procrastinator. Surviving Doomsday has a deadline. Miss it, we all die.
When a deadline is far away, I am foolishly oblivious, and as the deadline comes closer I become more alert and energized.
100 seconds to a deadline maps to a reproducible level of energized action, and the fact the Doomsday Clock doesn't move means that level of energy needs to be sustained for a while.
posted by otherchaz at 10:06 AM on January 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

Look, if you can come up with the perfect symbol to gauge our proximity to self-annihilation, one that somehow accommodates all the known human agents of destruction and the relative threat of imminent catastrophe while also accommodating our capacity to joke about it in terms of units of Scaramucci.. please, share with the world.

The clock is not the problem here.
posted by elkevelvet at 10:12 AM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

The statement contains nothing surprising if you've been paying attention, but it's still worth a read.
posted by swr at 10:40 AM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

COVID-19 will not obliterate civilization, and we expect the disease to recede eventually. Still, the pandemic serves as a historic wake-up call, a vivid illustration that national governments and international organizations are unprepared to manage nuclear weapons and climate change, which currently pose existential threats to humanity, or the other dangers—including more virulent pandemics and next-generation warfare—that could threaten civilization in the near future.
posted by doctornemo at 10:51 AM on January 27, 2021

This hit me more pointedly than I would have expected: "No longer believing in God, we now believe in adults in the room."
posted by PhineasGage at 10:54 AM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'm glad cashman created this post. This is a significant statement.

I'm not happy with the heaps of complaint that this thread carried, but I suspect part of that is due to not having access right away to the statement and others' commentary.
posted by doctornemo at 11:42 AM on January 27, 2021