The Doomsday Clock and Other Amusements

I spent a leisurely hour on Sunday afternoon watching a History Channel International program about the Doomsday Clock. For those of you who don’t know what the clock’s about, check out thebulletin.org.

It seems to have started as a group of concerned atomic scientists who wanted some way to present (or…dramatize) their highly subjective view of the immediacy of the threat that nuclear weapons pose to humanity. It seems that “midnight” means…. DOOMSDAY. And things kicked off, after World War II, with the clock just a few minutes away from that decisively scary moment.

Now, whenever anything deemed important by this little unaccountable group of scientists and journalists (the line seems to have blurred somewhat) they put on the capes of sages and go move the minute hand accordingly.

They seem to have no sense whatever for the rich comedic value of a few random folks in some random place attaching great predictive significance to the small movements of a giant minute hand on a clock. The more puzzling thing is, the movements of said clock actually get reported as news. It seems that the same people who take the Nobel committees seriously are very serious about this clock.

In late 2007 the minute hand was pushed a couple of ticks closer to midnight (we can only hope that when this happens its done with the appropriately ominous theatrical flourish) in recognition of the grave threat global climate change poses to all of us.

I’m not aware of anyone to date asking them if they don’t sometimes feel a touch….silly with their big clock and their inflated sense of its significance.