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The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Introduces the Doomsday Dashboard 92

Posted by samzenpus from the for-your-viewing-pleasure dept.
Lasrick writes You probably know the hand on the Doomsday Clock now rests at 3 minutes to midnight. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has launched a pretty cool little interactive Dashboard that lets you see data that the Bulletin's Science and Security Board considers when making the decision on the Clock's time each year. There are interactive graphs that show global nuclear arsenals, nuclear material security breaches, and how much weapons-grade plutonium and uranium is stored (and where). The climate change section features graphs of global sea level rise over time, Arctic sea ice minimums. atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and differences in global temperature. There's also a section for research on biosecurity and emerging technologies.
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The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Introduces the Doomsday Dashboard More

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Introduces the Doomsday Dashboard

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  • Not comprehensive (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Sure, they added climate change to try to stay relevant when nuclear stockpiles plunged, but there are so many possible doomsdays they ignore entirely.
    I see nothing about zombies on the site, for example.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      What about bog-standard boring conventional warfare?

      • What about bog-standard boring conventional warfare?

        How is that going to cause a "doomsday"? Even during WWII, the population of the world as a whole went up. Many technological developments driven by the the war, may have saved more lives after the war than were lost during it.

    • Sure, they added climate change to try to stay relevant when nuclear stockpiles plunged, but there are so many possible doomsdays they ignore entirely.
      I see nothing about zombies on the site, for example.

      Personally, I consider zombies to be vastly more likely a threat than any "climate change" from CO2.

      Which is to say: not at all. Zombies in the movies kill people who are stupid and slow.

      But maybe the whole CO2 warming schtick is aimed at stupid and slow people too. Even better.

      • If you're not an old fart like me maybe you'll live long enough to find out how wrong you are about anthropogenic climate change.

        Instead of calling people climate science deniers maybe we should start calling them climate zombies.

        • If you're not an old fart like me maybe you'll live long enough to find out how wrong you are about anthropogenic climate change.

          More likely I'll live long enough to freeze my ass off waiting for it to happen.

          • Ah, you must live on the East Coast. Out here in Oregon where I live it's been warm and up in the Cascades there's no snow where normally there would be at least 3 feet of snow pack by now.

  • Doomsday Dashboard: Live at Budokan - now available on iTunes!

    .

  • 3 minutes (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bugs2squash ( 1132591 ) on Monday March 23, 2015 @12:01PM (#49320965)
    Have you ever seen a movie where the bomb was defused with 3 minutes left on the clock. No-one will be interested until its in single digits of seconds to midnight.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by glitch! ( 57276 )

      And why do they always assume that the trigger is at a zero countdown? Why doesn't the bomber set the timer to go off at fifty-one minutes or eleven minutes and six seconds, for example?

    • Have you ever seen a movie where the bomb was defused with 3 minutes left on the clock. No-one will be interested until its in single digits of seconds to midnight.

      That's why, if I ever turn super-villain, I'll set my bombs to detonate at 3 minutes and fourteen seconds. This way, the heroes will just be starting to decide that they should disarm the bomb when it blows up.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You and GP need to read up on Adrian Veidt.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rakhar ( 2731433 )

      I dunno, 2 Minutes to Midnight would be pretty amusing.

  • That clock moves almost as slow as the one in my work computer.

    (dear fricking gawd! I swear it's been 17:14 for at least two days!)

  • spring forward (Score:5, Funny)

    by turkeydance ( 1266624 ) on Monday March 23, 2015 @12:17PM (#49321097)
    it's an HOUR and 3 minutes until midnight.

  • Clock you say? (Score:5, Funny)

    by danbert8 ( 1024253 ) on Monday March 23, 2015 @12:23PM (#49321139)

    So if the earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old and this clock is representing a day between creation and doomsday... Hmm, 1440 minutes in a day, 3 minutes till midnight... Carry the two...

    We can expect the Earth to exist for another 9.5 million years!

    Whew... I was about to panic.

    • We can expect the Earth to exist for another 9.5 million years!

      Oh of this there is no question, but the tricked-out primates who inhabit the face of said planet and who are always flinging their tricked-out shit around may face a different story.

  • What's with the inclusion of "climate change"? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Monday March 23, 2015 @12:26PM (#49321177)

    OK, if they want to guess how far we are from disaster caused by nuclear weapons, that's fine. But why co-mingle "climate change" - is this just a "we need funding" thing?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      Pretty much. No one cares about nuclear weapons since the cold war ended. Well, no one but old, irrelevant people.

      • No one cares about nuclear weapons since the cold war ended. Well, no one but old, irrelevant people.

        Are you stupid or trolling? You must be a weapons-grade imbecile to not care about nuclear weapons. You seriously think that a device that can fit in the trunk of a car or on the nosecone of a missile, capable of can vaporizing a major metropolitan area in an instant, is not a big deal? That might be the dumbest thing I've ever read on slashdot in the last 15 years and that is saying something.

        • Re:Dumbest comment ever (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Monday March 23, 2015 @02:22PM (#49322339) Homepage Journal
          You sound like someone who's old. Or irrelevant. Were you one of those people protesting in front of air force bases in the 70's? Sure, a nuclear-armed Iran is a convenient boogeyman to wave around to scare the US public. Who's doing that? John McCain mostly. Let's apply our criteria to him. Old? Yup. He's practically yelling at the rest of Congress to get off his lawn. And irrelevant? Yep, pretty much. No one cares what John McCain thinks, except maybe some old people in Florida and Arizona and some irrelevant people at Fox News.

          Nuclear weapons were a convenient boogeyman to wave around when you were a hippie in the 70's. "Oh, they're going to blow the world up unless we pour this goat's blood on the gate of the air force base!" Discounting the fact that making a nuclear bomb is really hard (Iran and North Korea have been trying for as long as I've been alive, despite the fact that the general concepts are simple enough for a teenager to grasp,) and making something to deliver it is also really hard. By the time you get done doing all that stuff, you may as well have just leveled a city with conventional weapons. We did a lot more to Japan with conventional weapons than we did with nuclear ones in WWII, by the way. But after all that, some very interesting politics come into play, which is why India and Pakistan haven't nuked each other. And you know, the longer a nuclear device sits, the less likely it is that it's going to work. Your nice pure plutonium core starts getting crapped up with hydrogen bubbles. And those things are already very finicky as Iran and North Korea are finding out.

          So yeah, on a scale of things that are likely to kill you, nuclear war is simply not one of them. You're significantly more likely to be shot by a disgruntled co-worker or a road-raging jackass in a giant penis truck. His truck is very very big, his penis is very very small and he's angry! In fact if you asked 1000 random people if they worry more about dying in a nuclear war or to zombies, I'd be willing to bet most of them would say zombies. Which are fictional.

      • Pretty much. No one cares about nuclear weapons since the cold war ended. Well, no one but old, irrelevant people.

        I'm less worried about full scale nuclear war, but I'm a lot more worried about nuclear weapons proliferation to groups that are unlikely to use them with any sort of restraint.

        • Pretty much. No one cares about nuclear weapons since the cold war ended. Well, no one but old, irrelevant people.

          I'm less worried about full scale nuclear war, but I'm a lot more worried about nuclear weapons proliferation to groups that are unlikely to use them with any sort of restraint.

          You mean countries like Israel?

          • You mean countries like Israel?

            No. Stable, developed, democratic nation states don't worry me much. Besides, as best I can tell they've had the bomb for a long time and haven't nuked anyone yet. I'm more worried about unstable, failed, theocratic and expansionist states or non-state actors.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by epyT-R ( 613989 )

      More like a fifth column left wing propaganda thing. There aren't many atomic scientists there anymore. Political activists are all that's left.

    • Not funding but mission creep. It's endemic with any NGO - once the original raison d'être disappears, rather than fold up shop, they just move on to the next bit of do-goodery. Sometime, that's a good thing - the March of Dimes built up a working infrastructure for funding polio eradication and decided to broaden the scope from eradicating infant paralysis (polio) to general improvement of infant health once the fight against polio was (largely) won.

      Other times, it leads to ridiculous concepts like at

    • And if the country you live in happens to be one of the 31 most threatened by sea level rise?

  • Nuclear Material Incidents (Score:4, Funny)

    by Thanshin ( 1188877 ) on Monday March 23, 2015 @12:29PM (#49321211)

    7 - Unknown.

    I wonder how these come to happen.

    "Captain Johnson! Where the fuck are the two tons of plutonium you left the base with!"
    *shrugs* "No idea."
    "WHAT!"
    "NO IDEA. SIR!"
    "Ok, that's better. Try to be more careful with the next plutonium truck. Shit ain't growing on trees, you know?"

    • Probably more like:

      "Where are those two pounds of plutonium?"
      "Eh, logbook says it's in Building C."
      "No, it's not. I checked."
      "Don't know where it might be, then."

    • Sir, we found the missing plutonium. It was under a pile of socks from the dryer, car keys, and TV remote controls.

  • Ignorance is Bliss (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I grew up with the thought that global Nuclear war wasn't a question of "if" but "when" I spent a lot of my childhood lying in bed wondering when that next EBS "test" would be the for real deal or not

    And after all these decades of wars, accidents, political and religious conflagrations I just don't have the ability to care about the doomsday clock anymore because it will NEVER END

    I'll throw my end of the world fears on the pile of rusted Thunderbolt sirens and move the dial off of 640 AM, peace is war forev

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I feel the same way. I've been constantly told the world was on the brink of disaster from one cause or another since I was a child 40 years ago. At some point I realized that nothing serious ever happened, and things kept getting better and I just stopped believing it. This is probably why I'm skeptical that global warming will have a serious negative impact on my life.

      • At some point I realized that nothing serious ever happened, and things kept getting better and I just stopped believing it.

        So by your logic because nuclear war hasn't happened yet, it never will? That's... impressively illogical and dangerous.

        This is probably why I'm skeptical that global warming will have a serious negative impact on my life.

        If you are over the age of 40 and look at actuarial tables, global warming might or might not impact your life greatly. But if you give a crap about those who are younger than you then there is a very real probability it will impact younger folks in very tangible and serious ways. Within my lifetime glaciers have hugely receded, the Arctic ice cap has shrunken to historic lows, etc. If

    • I grew up with the thought that global Nuclear war wasn't a question of "if" but "when" I spent a lot of my childhood lying in bed wondering when that next EBS "test" would be the for real deal or not

      That used to scare the hell out of me when I was a kid too. Now that I'm ,ahem, middle-aged I've become somewhat jaded. I really hate to admit that I've become jaded (and middle aged). But you can only take so much before you either get desensitized to it, or become a basket case.

      In my lifetime, we've been threatened by extinction due to nuclear war, biological war, "the neutron bomb", comet/asteroid impact, solar storms, the sun going nova, a nearby star going supernova, gravitational alignment of Jupiter

  • They're reviving the Yugo?! (Score:3)

    by jpellino ( 202698 ) on Monday March 23, 2015 @12:59PM (#49321517)
    Sorry, there must be another use of the term "doomsday dashboard" that I wasn't previously familiar with.

  • *Klaxon*

    Oops!

    While the Doomsday clock is an evocative metaphor, nearly 70 years, and mission drift (was originally only encompassed destruction by nuclear war) have rendered it impotent and corrupted.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Or is there another use of the term "doomsday dashboard" that I wasn't previously familiar with? (this may dupe - submissions seemed borked for a bit)

  • I haven't done any research on the clock, but what little I could find on wiki doesn't give any relative meaning to the setting. If it's set to 23:57, what does 00:01 represent? It all seems awfully arbitrary and set to an alarmist tone since anything with only 3 minutes left must be urgent! If you are being arbitrary with the setting then you could calculate the same date to equate to 02:30,. but then no one would talk about it as if it had meaning.

    And what's a minute? Since it's clearly not a minute.

    • It's nothing but a metaphorical representation, not a percentage or actual time. It was born in an age when people genuinely feared that nuclear Armageddon may happen any day, and seemed to capture those fears in an evocative manner. Nowadays, it's much less relevant, as the fears of an all-out nuclear war have largely subsided. One could cynically argue that the addition of global warming is simply an attempt to stay relevant.

      Incidentally, three minutes to midnight is about as bad as the clock has ever

  • It's Arbitrary and Alarmist (Score:3)

    by ThomasBHardy ( 827616 ) on Monday March 23, 2015 @01:30PM (#49321881)

    I haven't done any research on the clock, but what little I could find on wiki doesn't give any relative meaning to the setting. If it's set to 23:57, what does 00:01 represent? It all seems awfully arbitrary and set to an alarmist tone since anything with only 3 minutes left must be urgent! If you are being arbitrary with the setting then you could calculate the same date to equate to 02:30,. but then no one would talk about it as if it had meaning.

    And what's a minute? Since it's clearly not a minute. Or do the mean each of the 1440 minutes to represent .07% of a percentile and being at 11:57 means we're 99.79% likely to end this year?

    For a group of "scientists" (and yes I put that in quotes cause I'm not seeing any science), this certainly seems more like marketing hype.

    Someone please chime in if there's a real meaning to all of this.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by G00F ( 241765 )

      This isn't science, but scientists way of playing politics.

      Yes, alarmist, fear-mongering, add in a few facts, some blaming. Still blaming the all mighty Nuke but adding another point, climate change, to their soapbox.

      But yes, I also agree with your implied sentiment that using a clock where we are at 99.79% at the end when at most we got as low as 98.75% with USA and Soviet signing Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, and the Soviet Union dissolves.(and that was after the Fall of the Berlin Wall) IMHO the cloc

  • They should start that sea level rise clock about 20,000 years ago, it's been rising since the last ice age. Most of the time at faster rate than it is now.

    • Actually the major sea level rise from the end of the last glacial period (ice age) ended about 4,000 years ago and sea level has been pretty stable since then. Sea level has risen about 8 inches in the last century which is more change than in the last 2,000 years. From Wikipedia: [wikipedia.org]

      For example, geological observations indicate that during the last 2,000 years, sea level change was small, with an average rate of only 0.0–0.2 mm per year. This compares to an average rate of 1.7 ± 0.5 mm per year for the 20th century.[34] In its Fifth Assessment Report, The IPCC found that recent observations of global average sea level rise at a rate of 3.2 [2.8 to 3.6] mm per year is consistent with the sum of contributions from observed thermal ocean expansion due to rising temperatures (1.1 [0.8 to 1.4] mm per year, glacier melt (0.76 [0.39 to 1.13] mm per year), Greenland ice sheet melt (0.33 [0.25 to 0.41] mm per year), Antarctic ice sheet melt (0.27 [0.16 to 0.38] mm per year), and changes to land water storage (0.38 [0.26 to 0.49] mm per year).

      • Doesn't change the truth of what I said, you are cherry picking a range. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        • How does what happened more than 6,000 or 7,000 years ago matter to modern civilization? Sea level has been remarkably stable during that period.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Troed ( 102527 )

        With regards to the Wikipedia article claiming a historical 0.0-0.2mm range over the last 2000 years that probably needs to be updated with more recent research.

        Thewell-preserved biological remains on the sh tank wall allow us to estimate anRSL rise of 40 ±10 cm at Frejus since Roman times

        400 / 2000 = 0.2mm average per year over the last 2000 years. (And as documented in this paper there are other papers that claim higher numbers)

        http://www.academia.edu/344003... [academia.edu]éjus_France

        (Slashdot seems to make

        • The paper talks about relative sea level change in a single location. How much meaning that has for global sea level changes is questionable.

  • The signs of the apocalypse have been around for thousands of years. What makes these signs any more relevant than the other signs?

  • The user could customize the display of his/her Apple Watch with of the real-time status of one of the indicators in the dashboard, with the time display as minutes to midnight in any desired time zone and time display format. It would be a doomsayer's dream.

  • "all the FUD that's fit to print" (Score:3)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Monday March 23, 2015 @02:56PM (#49322511) Journal

    BoAS has been crying that the world is in *imminent* danger of destruction since at least the 1970s. At a certain point, even they have to question their own credibility insisting that the sky will be falling 'any moment now'.

    Look at their logo for the doomsday clock, for pete's sake: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... [wikipedia.org] it implies there is no conceivable reading in which we're not in immediate, constant danger.

    This is PRECISELY the sort of crap that has led to much of the public disregarding "science" as a thing that can speak to many issues in our daily life - the BoAS may be staffed by nominal scientists, but they're otherwise pretty much typical, naive, left-wing academics trying desperately to parlay their "sciency" credentials into credibility in foreign policy and geopolitics.

    Would you read a periodical on Particle Physics written by Michelle Bachman, Henry Kissinger, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi? Maybe for the laughs, I admit.
    Then why would anyone give any more credence to a political pamphlet published by scientists?

  • Just stick one of these in a box with an LED. if the LED is on, it's doomsday.

    http://www.maxwell.com/product... [maxwell.com]

    "Maxwell’s radiation-hardened, hybrid, Nuclear Event Detectors (NED) sense ionizing radiation pulses generated by a nuclear event, such as the detonation of a nuclear weapon, and rapidly switches its output from the normal high state to a low state with a propagation delay time of less than 20ns."

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