Five Minutes to Midnight

Looks like we need to change the trope page picture for the Doomsday Clock.

TL;DR version: The Doomsday Clock has now been set to 5 minutes to midnight because of uncertainty over the threat of nuclear weapons and climate change.

Anyways, discuss.

edited 10th Jan '12 12:37:25 PM by tclittle

Considering it's been to two and back up to six, the whole thing seems very silly until we can prove time travel.

A clock implies, like the passing of time, that doom is inevitable, but by the movements of the clock itself that's obviously not the case.

edited 10th Jan '12 1:33:47 PM by ohsointocats

The thing was set at 5 to midnight back in 1998! They had a press conference!

I think its lost its original message. Now they are including "global warming" as a nuclear threat? I don't see the reasoning behind that at all. Nowadays the doomsday clock is more like a silly club that doddering old farts maintain for kicks rather than an actual thing we need to pay attention to.

Am I the only one who read the title in the tune of Iron Maiden's 2 Minutes to Midnight? Probably.

Anyway, I can understand the unease about nuclear stuff due to Iran's dumbfuckery, but they are including global warming? I can kinda see it, I guess, but it still kinda seems odd to me to include it on that list.

Well the sun is nuclear...

I thought the same thing, thought I was the only one. But still, hasn't this happened before?

I honestly think it should be at 3 or 4, at this point...

Global warming shouldn't be on the clock count anyway. It's global-scale disastrous, a whole lot of ecosystems get fucked beyond belief, and the population takes a terrifying spike down when people can't grow food in the summer because of glacial loss, but it's not a complete worldwide destruction of civilization "THE END" event like MAD.

edited 11th Jan '12 4:20:02 PM by Pykrete

Presuming that the people with nukes aren't abysmally retarded and don't groundburst their warheads, I don't know that a nuclear exchange would be the end of human civilization to begin with.

It would certainly be the end of the First World (and much of the Second World), but since they're the ones who set the standard I guess that is "the end of human civilization."

~eye roll~

^^ True, but the fight over those dwindling resources will be MAD. Hence, why Global Warming is factored in. One could even count Peak Oil.

Basically, any resource shortfall will lead to increased competition for the remainder. If it gets bad enough and some nation gets desperate for it enough, conflict will result.

^ Might as well be - it will be the end of Industrial Civilization, pretty much.

edited 11th Jan '12 4:32:19 PM by pvtnum11

Peak oil is a bit shakier. If nothing else, a timely investment in solar farming out in the deserts would be the most optimal way for the Middle East to salvage as much of its economy as possible in the transition by still selling shitloads of energy to the first world. They'd be working in essentially the exact same market.

Of course, that means, you know, ditching the whole oil cartel thing.

edited 11th Jan '12 4:41:13 PM by Pykrete

Some MENA nations could probably be convinced to do this in record time. One's like Tunisia and Morocco, which have next to nothing oil-wise. They could sell that power to Europe and, voila! Jordan and Lebanon too.

Considering that industrial society is only 400 years old, I think it's silly to suggest that the destruction of it would end civilization.

But we kinda, sorta need it to colonize space and avoid certain extinction in a billion years, tops... Part of the reasons why I ain't no primitivist.

Well, if we just nuked > 60% of the population back into the Stone Age (and that part of the population was the part that's doing the majority of the ecological damage), I'd think the whole "we need to go into space to survive" thing would go away in favor of "we need to, you know, rebuild stuff."

Or rather, what's left (the Third World) would need to modernize. Methinks that would go quite poorly, but...

The thing about oil isn't just energy. It has half a million other uses. Plastics, chemicals of all sorts, herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, medicines, and so on. You can't replace that with solar energy.

edited 12th Jan '12 11:24:01 AM by pvtnum11

Then we need to phase out oil burning as soon as it's feasible and save as much petrol as we can for stuff where it's actually non-replaceable. I think we'll achieve that point when we get generic batteries capable of giving an electric truck 500 miles of autonomy. Shut down vehicle, cold swap battery at the nearest energy station, keep goin'. The battery is then recharged and inserted into another vehicle of the same category.

We ought to stop thermal energy plants right now: There's no reason at all not to replace it with nuclear and renewables.

edited 12th Jan '12 12:05:23 PM by SavageHeathen

Yeah, I agree with you. Then we can work on recycling the material uses for crude, and stretch the existing supplies that much further.

Geothermal, nuclear, wind, solar, and so on. The only problem is that we're addicted to cheap electricity. Building up a solar array in a sunny spot will not be cheap, and until oil gets to the point in which it's better to do the switch and kiss fofssile fuel powerplants goodbye, companies are dragging their feet on the matter.

So, when supplies finally can't meet demand anymore, then it'll be too late, and you get Resource Wars. Which is idiocy; war is a horribly way to spend resources. It's kind of like spending fifty bucks to secure access to twenty-five more bucks. Uh, aren't we in the hole for twenty-five now...?

You could always jack the gas taxes through the roof and do it artificially, but it would be political suicide for whoever tried...

...

...political Heroic Sacrifice?

Don't worry; we'll have cold fusion in about thirty years!

...

To export solar energy, you need to make it transportable. Trying to run an electric cable over really long distances means high resistance. You could use the solar energy to, say, hydrolyze water, or produce synthetic petroleum, and so forth, which you'll still have to ship, but at this point that's not profitable.

You could invent fancy energy storage battery... things...

Well, AC was cost effective for around 2,500 miles back in 1984, DC for almost twice that. [1] So advances since then aside, that's enough to get AC halfway through Europe from Iraq, and northern Africa could reach the rest of it quite handily.

Resistance actually isn't that much of an issue over very high voltage cables. It's already crazy low, and doubling the voltage lowers power loss by a factor of 4.

edited 12th Jan '12 4:59:59 PM by Pykrete

Yeah, if I remember correctly, about the only way to improve transmission of electricity would be to switch to silver-based cables (silver being the only material that's a better electric conductor than copper). Obviously, for supply reasons, we can't do that, so...