Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

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I was reflecting just this morning how glad I am that I don't have children. (And I don't follow the 24/7 newscycle or use Twitter.) You want perspective?

The Doomsday Clock is still set to 100 seconds before midnight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

> Aside from Covid ...

Covid isn't the last virus. And the tools we use to fight it are also the tools we could use to make worse ones. (Every tool is also a weapon. As long as people are willing to hurt each other technology is fraught with danger.)

Here's a brand new failure mode to worry about: "A puzzling lack of thiamine is disrupting some marine ecosystems." https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-oceans-mysterious...

We don't yet know how bad it is nor what's causing it.

And where the hell are all the bugs!? It's warming up now and there's nobody out there. That should scare the fuck out of you. It does me.

How many habitable planets are there? One. There is one habitable planet.

>The Doomsday Clock is still set to 100 seconds before midnight.

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

The same article points out it's not exactly objective, and I'm inclined to agree. It's more of a political (ie. subjective) statement that the world is fucked rather than an objective measure.

>Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker harshly criticized the Doomsday Clock as a political stunt, pointing to the words of its founder that its purpose was "to preserve civilization by scaring men into rationality." He stated that it is inconsistent and not based on any objective indicators of security, using as an example its being farther from midnight in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis than in the "far calmer 2007". He argued it was another example of humanity's tendency toward historical pessimism, and compared it to other predictions of self-destruction that went unfulfilled.[24]

It's not like I can link to an objective measure, eh? There's no actual Doom-o-meter?

The point is that serious thinkers (not just talking heads or twitterers) see cause for concern, so it's not all hysteria and click bait.

You’re worried about the Doomsday Clock? You realize it’s just made up right?

North Korea isn't made up. The tension between Pakistan and India isn't made up.

And the Doomsday Clock was "just made up" by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists not a bunch of yahoos.

> In addition to Rabinowitch and Goldsmith, contributors have included: Morton Grodzins, Hans Bethe, Anatoli Blagonravov, Max Born, Harrison Brown, Stuart Chase, Brock Chisholm, E.U. Condon, Albert Einstein, E.K. Fedorov, Bernard T. Feld, James Franck, Ralph E. Lapp, Richard S. Leghorn, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Lord Boyd Orr, Michael Polanyi, Louis Ridenour, Bertrand Russell, Nikolay Semyonov, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, A.V. Topchiev, Harold C. Urey, Paul Weiss, James L. Tuck, among many others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_of_the_Atomic_Scienti...

Recognize?

Doomsday Clock is a politically-driven relic from the Cold War era. We don't trust politicians to be experts on the climate, so why do we trust a bunch of scientists to be foreign policy experts?

I contend there's a lot of potentially existential threats out there, but to use it as a crutch for not having children is weak, especially when people still procreated through much worse times.

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