Until a few years ago, I don’t think many people had heard of the “doomsday clock”.
But what is it that strikes gloom and dread into people who hear that the world is slowly ticking onto midnight? What happens then!
Maintained since 1947, the doomsday clock is a symbol that represents the likelihood of a man made global catastrophe, (in the opinion of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists), with a new time announced each January.
It was originally an attempt to inform those interested parties of the danger of nuclear weapons on our planet.
Not sure why though, but the original setting on the clock was seven minutes to midnight; however, it seems that the clock has gone backward and forward since then, depending on the state of the world at large.
A new perspective this year is the climate change debate, whether it’s as real as first thought, whether it’s as urgent as many say it is or whether the urgency is on countries to clean up their act. There is a great debate whether countries can afford to go down the climate change path and suffer great economic cost to their population for little or no tangible climatic effect on the planet, while other countries, larger polluters, carry on regardless due to their population situation.
Growing up in those early days, there was nary a mention of this clock business. Today we have a different story; our children have so much information at their fingertips, unfortunately much of their time is spent on line with others and they may still be not quite aware of what’s happening around them.
Were you aware of the doomsday clock? Most of our early knowledge was gained from the pages of an encyclopedia that our parents were persuaded to buy from travelling salesmen going door to door.
Its hard to believe that in 70 years we have come so far that we can hold in one hand all the information the world has to offer, and then some.
There may be a lot of negative aspects of the internet and computers in general. We may feel for its shortcomings, but we would have to be the most informed generation, so far.
Even now with the advent of AI (artificial intelligence) the world is changing again. We’ve had robotics in a lot of industries for years, but now seems a turning point where these robots will be used to help us in our daily lives. Think about the 1999 movie Bicentennial Man starring Robin Williams where he was bought to help a family with domestic duties and ended up changing their lives. Robots have been in the movies since the ’30s in some form or other, very crude depictions at first, but changing as time went on and now the new “breed of AI” coming in our lifetime. Should seniors be worried when each year we hear of a different time being allocated to the clock? Or is it a wakeup call to all humanity and those who are supposedly in charge of our countries, to be aware and take notice?
Maybe a bit of both, reminding us of our obligation to each other. Maybe our children’s children and future generations can change the clock and have it go backwards.
