Five Minutes to Midnight
The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic clock face that is supposed to be a measure of how close we are to Armageddon. It was recently adjusted to 5 minutes to midnight. This happens periodically. The board of directors of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists will move its hands a few minutes forward or back. But not too far.
There’s no room to move far forward, since the time was 7 minutes to midnight—doomsday—at its creation, and it’s never been set farther than 17 minutes to midnight. And moving it a significant distance back would undermine its purpose: to get people wringing their hands over how close we are to destruction—look! We’re only 8 minutes to midnight!
Whatever that means.
I mean really, even setting aside the question of why the self-appointed committee that sets the clock is any authority, what, literally, does the clock measure?
It doesn’t measure actual time, obviously, since it’s been around longer than seven minutes. But neither does it measure time on any scale. The clock occasionally goes backwards, after all.
It doesn’t measure probability of the earth’s destruction. The earth will definitely be destroyed within a few billion years, when the sun enters a red giant stage and engulfs our planet. Regardless of what may happen to it first, the earth is definitely a-goner, not 12 minutes to a-goner.
It doesn’t measure the probability of humanity’s destruction, either. Even presuming we escape earth into the greater universe before the sun vaporizes our planet, sooner or later the universe will die of thermodynamic exhaustion. Or, by some models, it will collapse under gravity into a big crunch. Either way, no one gets out of here alive.
If anything, the clock measures a ratio of time and velocity, the time we have left if we approach self-destruction at the current rate. As if anyone knows either value. Not long ago, the clock stopped measuring the urgency of the threat of nuclear war alone, and began to measure the urgency of the threat of pollution. Because the earlier atomic scientists overestimated the first, and underestimated the latter. Presumably the experts have it worked out right, now. Atomic scientists being so knowledgeable about chemical pollutants and global warming and all.
But even granting that they do, the clock’s reading is meaningless without a scale. As noted above, the clock obviously doesn’t operate one a one minute to one minute scale, so just how urgent is 5 minutes to midnight? Does that mean doomsday is 5 minutes away? 5 years? 5000 years? To establish the scale, we need two points. We have one: current conditions. A second point, however, is hard to find. Earlier settings could be used, had they been reliable, but they aren’t: the setting during the Cuban missile crisis, for example, was earlier than the setting when Gorbachev introduced Glasnost.
It occurs to me that we could, alternately, use an absolute: the zero point. If an infinitesimal notch past the previous midnight is no danger at all, then we could figure out how far we are from annihilation. Indeed, that is the implicit message of the clock: look at all the time in our metaphorical day, and how little is left. So what corresponds to no danger at all? Well, humans use non-renewable resources, and humans war over scarce resources, and humans pollute. (We’re counting pollution now, remember.) So really, the ideal the Doomsday Clock implies we should be striving for, of complete peace and prosperity, corresponds to no human population at all.
Achieving which would be a fair approximation of Armageddon.