We are now 90 seconds to our doom | Hacker News Reader

We are now 90 seconds to our doom

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25 pointsTomte34 comments

I have no idea why anyone pays attention to this thing anymore. It's just become a cheap tool that journalists get a free pass to hit their budget.

Agreed. As if we're 4 times closer now than during the Cuban missle crisis...

Also, it's kind of useless to have a whole clock metaphor if you're only using the last hour. It's never been greater than 17 minutes. It feels closer to the orange alert of 2001 than an effective communication tool.

> While it’s just a metaphor, the decision to move the clock’s hands closer to midnight reflects real-world risks.

To have studies and experts is not enough to communicate the world situation. This seems a very visual and pedagogic way of representing the risks that the world is facing. And to be fair, Russia has said numerous times that they are willing to use atomic bombs to fulfill the annexation of new territories, even if it were a bluff things can go wrong easily with this kind of rhetoric.

This is false, no Russian government official has threatened to use nuclear weapons.

Medvedev threatens almost daily, albeit indirectly.

(his credibility is also questionable)

Problem is they have to keep moving it closer to midnight or they won't get any media attention. This leads to ridiculous outcomes like showing we are currently 5x closer to nuclear war than during the Cuban missile crisis when it was at 7 mins. Not sure why anybody takes this seriously.

> Problem is they have to keep moving it closer to midnight or they won't get any media attention.

It was last moved in 2020 and doesn't appear to move every year. Moreover, it has been moved back in the past. I don't get the impression this is some cynical media ploy but instead an educational effort from some well meaning experts in their respective fields trying to raise awareness and provoke action towards remedying various existential threats, including nuclear war, but also climate change and biological threats.

They are atomic scientists, so they actually aren't even experts in any of those fields. The risk of nuclear war is a geopolitical question which has nothing to do with the science behind the weapons.

> They are atomic scientists

"Atomic scientist" isn't even really a thing. This is a political advocacy magazine, and always has been.

Quite to the contrary, the clock is set by the Science and Security Board which seems much more focused on geopolitical questions instead of scientific. The Science and Security Board is advised by the Board of Sponsors, which does have quite a few scientists, but only in an advisory role.

The Cuban Missile Crisis only lasted 13 days. They operate this clock on a longer time scale. It's often years between updates.

Honestly it seems to me that Putin is mentally much closer to using nuclear weapons in his offensive war than Krushchev was in his perceived defense of Cuba in 1962.

The likelihood of an accidental nuclear launch was definitely higher then (e.g. by a submarine commander misinterpreting the situation). But I do think the likelihood of an intentional nuclear strike is substantially higher today. Some Russian decision makers seem to believe they could get away with a tactical strike. And then there's North Korea.

Putin is threatening nuclear war because he wants the general public in the west to fear their leaders' policies of sending more weapons to Ukraine. He directly benefits from the perception among the public that he is crazy enough to do it. But a look at his history shows him to be much more calculating and intelligent than that. He is not going to give the order to end the world when there are not even enemy troops on Russian soil.

As for a tactical strike, this is the "Doomsday Clock" so that doesn't count.

> Honestly it seems to me that Putin is mentally much closer to using nuclear weapons in his offensive war than Krushchev was in his perceived defense of Cuba in 1962.

That's because it wouldn't be Krushchev who would start nuclear war in 1962.

Eventually we’re going to have to go down to microseconds and nanoseconds, infinitesimally splitting the final instant, just to keep reminding people this thing still exists.

Does anyone take this seriously? Why?

Minutes-to-midnight over time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock#Timeline

90's were nice.

the people who arguably affect the clock's position the most, are also the first to go out and wonder aloud why we all aren't having more children :P

Clickbait title.

Factual headline: "This is the closest humanity has ever been to its own annihilation, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists."

the thing I never understood about nuclear annihilation is that doesn't it mainly focus on urban areas? Just curious are there enough nukes in the world to wipe every square km of the earth? When nations scale their arsenal what's their budgeting rationale, to hit all the major cities of an opponent?

Dropping a Tsar Bomba 17,080 km² https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

* Surface of North America 24.71 million km²

* Surface of South America 17.84 million km²

* Surface of Africa 30.37 million km²

You don't need to nuke every literal single square inch of the world to kill a majority of the population. Remove enough governments and the world will become anarchy. Destroy a lot of infrastructure and suddenly no goods, food, or water gets transported. Contaminate the sky and ground enough, and agriculture won't grow.

If you live in some tiny corner of the world, off the grid, grow your own food, without any dependencies on the outside world, you might survive for a while. But it won't be the world we live in today.

Very true. I think I'm hung up on the discrepancy with animations around this topic I eventually came to realize were extremely exaggerated. Like I think I saw a cartoon where like a chunk of the earth was removed like a lobotomy sort of thing, a huge sector of mass.

I realized much later that these bombs simply do not have that kind of power as terrible as they are. I also later realized that asteroids can do some major serious damage on a whole other magnitude beyond nukes. The size of an asteroid crater is way beyond the crater size of nukes

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Eart...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedan_Crater

The global effects of a nuclear war would be truly horrible. It's not just about the force of impact or blast radius or even how much land gets directly scorched.

It's akin to a major chain volcanic eruption... A huge amount of particulate blocks the sun for decades and everything withers. There will be no post apocalyptic society. This is a major extinction event, an ecosystem wipe.

Interestingly enough I can't make out the Tsar Bomba crater https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bomba+Zar/@73.5383394,54.7...

https://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-...

There are about 13,000 nukes, 2000 are on alert, that means ready to be used at any time.

Here is a US list of targets, there are also lists from Russia:

https://futureoflife.org/resource/us-nuclear-targets/

There are of course secondary effects:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/devastating-effects-of-nu...

I think it's meant to focus on urban areas and military installations. 50% of the US population lives in 1% of the area, so around 240,000 square km, and that would cover almost all of the decision makers, wealthy people, politicians, supply chain centers, etc. Then there is the resulting civilization breakdown and weather conditions for the rest of the population.

Kind of doesn’t matter. You’re probably luckier to get vaporized in a direct hit than the be on the outskirts in a world where the entire nuclear arsenal of the world has detonated somewhere on earth.

don't neglect the fallout, and the nuclear winter

Nuclear winter is largely a myth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_d...

also happens to coincide with the amount of dreams i've been having of being wiped out by some huge bomb/nuke. very odd and in a way comforting because i find myself dying fully in my dreams, and thus giving me a bit more grappling power with the concept of death

Nuclear bomb energy dissipates by the square of the distance from the center. As with all things non-linear, humans (including me) have a really hard time intuiting non-linear phenomenon. Since I don't live in any major city, I've found nuclear war to be much less personally terrifying after using Alex Wellers' NUKEMAP https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ .

That said, it would be absolutely devastating -- I merely don't fear personal annihilation in my current locale, or the need to even _think_ about a nuclear shelter.

Would be hard for Maiden to write a song with this

OK. Now what?

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