https://news.sky.com/story/doomsday-clock-moves-closer-to-midnight-what-does-it-mean-12794884
This story shows that technocrats can be idiots.
"The worst is closer to destruction than ever before" Really? You think so?
Closer to destruction than during the height of the cold war, when massive and new nuclear arsenals that don't even exist anymore were pointed at real targets and could have taken off at any moment? There were about 65,000 nuclear bombs, and today there's a tenth of that.
Closer than when Mao, who killed 100 million of his own people, who even the Soviets were terrified of, got his hands on nuclear weapons?
No, that's stupid. In fact, in a multi-polar world, the risks to our future go down instead of up because you don't have everyone pointing planet busters at everyone else.
It's also stupid because structurally we're not the sort of planet that goes to nuclear war at the moment. Our leaders are ancient and entrenched, our societies lack vital energy, around the world nobody really wants to go to war for the sake of their nation, and most of the people alive wouldn't be able to fight any wars that happen because they're too old or too fat or too nuts.
Wars are fought typically because vital societies have momentum that drives these things forward. The world wars occurred because of a young, vital, and dynamic set of societies that were excited to go out and fight for nations they cared about. Nationalism was still an important thing. Can you have wars with smaller professional armies? Sure, and they'll be smaller wars. The sort of total war that leads to global annihilation don't break out at times like this, instead you have shallower conflicts like the 30 years war which happened at a time of a less vital Europe and it wasn't anything like world wars.
Don't make the mistake of assuming I'm saying that wars need to be popular to occur. A lot of people on the ground didn't want the world wars to happen. What I'm saying is that the people of a nation are a kinetic force, and that force has a certain energy. If your battery is dead, you might be able to activate the starter, you might even be able to turn over the engine, but you probably won't be able to start the car without help, and even then you'll need to be careful because if you stall you might not be able to start again.
For empirical proof, look at Ukraine. Russia started a war in continental Europe. In a powder keg moment in history, that could have led to a world war. Instead, it's a regional conflict with conditional materiel support from others, not an all-out total war with everyone preparing to march on Moscow.
If China hits Taiwan, It too will likely remain a regional conflict with support from other regions, not a world war. Unlike World War 2, you don't have an imperial Japan with a fire lit under their asses by Commdore Perry's black ships and success in World War 1. India isn't part of the British Empire. And embarassingly, total war with China will result in the tide coming out with respect to global trade, and most countries will be discovered to have lost their swimsuits.
Could there be wars in the near future? Absolutely. Many nations are facing the final days of having any real vitality and in that late stage many are lashing out hoping to successfully eke out a few concessions before a long dormant era of rebuilding to help achieve additional stability. That's a sick cornered animal lashing out at a predator, rather than a predator in its prime on the hunt.
It's important to remember, history didn't start in 1938. We've been here before, and it wasn't nice, but it wasn't anything like the events that could end the world.
As for whether other forms of societal collapse could happen, I wrote a damn book about societal collapse, but this isn't the "societal collapse by demographics" clock, it's the "doomsday clock" that predicts the end of the world. We're inside the former, we're nowhere near the latter. Even if Russia dropped a nuke on Ukraine today, we're not getting a nuclear World War 3.
Even if we got that nuclear World War 3, I ran the math once, and if the US and russia used every nuke they have today at the same time, it'd be about the same as the volcanic eruption that caused the year without summer in the 1800s. Bad, but we survived the year without summer. In addition, that's a worst-case scenario, because volcanos can use that event to harm the climate with a very high efficiency that nuclear bombs (particularly distributed globally rather than in one spot) aren't capable of. As for fallout, in Japan people still live in Nagasaki and Hiroshima so fallout wouldn't be a perpetual issue.
We're also in an era where we're actually the most aware and the most proactive of environmental issues ever. In the 1950s, it was still considered totally acceptable in both the western world and the communist world to utterly destroy the environment. In America, rivers were so disgusting you'd get sick just standing next to them. In The USSR, the soviet union caused some of the largest environmental disasters in human history. Meanwhile, today even the Chinese are trying to clean up their act under intense pressure from their populations. Are we using more carbon today? Depends where you are, but in many countries the total carbon use is down and as the population declines the energy use will also decline. We're not in the same level of danger environmentally as we arguably were in the 1950s and 1960s either.
And to be clear about something, I don't need absolute confidence to be able to make this criticism, I just need confidence that their absolute confidence is misplaced. Big difference. I don't need to say everything is going to be fine and nothing bad will ever happen to say that it's stupid to attack a measurement indicating that we are predictably closer to the end of the world at this moment than ever before. An awful lot of bad things can happen -- including nuclear war or climate change -- without invoking doomsday.
This story shows that technocrats can be idiots.
"The worst is closer to destruction than ever before" Really? You think so?
Closer to destruction than during the height of the cold war, when massive and new nuclear arsenals that don't even exist anymore were pointed at real targets and could have taken off at any moment? There were about 65,000 nuclear bombs, and today there's a tenth of that.
Closer than when Mao, who killed 100 million of his own people, who even the Soviets were terrified of, got his hands on nuclear weapons?
No, that's stupid. In fact, in a multi-polar world, the risks to our future go down instead of up because you don't have everyone pointing planet busters at everyone else.
It's also stupid because structurally we're not the sort of planet that goes to nuclear war at the moment. Our leaders are ancient and entrenched, our societies lack vital energy, around the world nobody really wants to go to war for the sake of their nation, and most of the people alive wouldn't be able to fight any wars that happen because they're too old or too fat or too nuts.
Wars are fought typically because vital societies have momentum that drives these things forward. The world wars occurred because of a young, vital, and dynamic set of societies that were excited to go out and fight for nations they cared about. Nationalism was still an important thing. Can you have wars with smaller professional armies? Sure, and they'll be smaller wars. The sort of total war that leads to global annihilation don't break out at times like this, instead you have shallower conflicts like the 30 years war which happened at a time of a less vital Europe and it wasn't anything like world wars.
Don't make the mistake of assuming I'm saying that wars need to be popular to occur. A lot of people on the ground didn't want the world wars to happen. What I'm saying is that the people of a nation are a kinetic force, and that force has a certain energy. If your battery is dead, you might be able to activate the starter, you might even be able to turn over the engine, but you probably won't be able to start the car without help, and even then you'll need to be careful because if you stall you might not be able to start again.
For empirical proof, look at Ukraine. Russia started a war in continental Europe. In a powder keg moment in history, that could have led to a world war. Instead, it's a regional conflict with conditional materiel support from others, not an all-out total war with everyone preparing to march on Moscow.
If China hits Taiwan, It too will likely remain a regional conflict with support from other regions, not a world war. Unlike World War 2, you don't have an imperial Japan with a fire lit under their asses by Commdore Perry's black ships and success in World War 1. India isn't part of the British Empire. And embarassingly, total war with China will result in the tide coming out with respect to global trade, and most countries will be discovered to have lost their swimsuits.
Could there be wars in the near future? Absolutely. Many nations are facing the final days of having any real vitality and in that late stage many are lashing out hoping to successfully eke out a few concessions before a long dormant era of rebuilding to help achieve additional stability. That's a sick cornered animal lashing out at a predator, rather than a predator in its prime on the hunt.
It's important to remember, history didn't start in 1938. We've been here before, and it wasn't nice, but it wasn't anything like the events that could end the world.
As for whether other forms of societal collapse could happen, I wrote a damn book about societal collapse, but this isn't the "societal collapse by demographics" clock, it's the "doomsday clock" that predicts the end of the world. We're inside the former, we're nowhere near the latter. Even if Russia dropped a nuke on Ukraine today, we're not getting a nuclear World War 3.
Even if we got that nuclear World War 3, I ran the math once, and if the US and russia used every nuke they have today at the same time, it'd be about the same as the volcanic eruption that caused the year without summer in the 1800s. Bad, but we survived the year without summer. In addition, that's a worst-case scenario, because volcanos can use that event to harm the climate with a very high efficiency that nuclear bombs (particularly distributed globally rather than in one spot) aren't capable of. As for fallout, in Japan people still live in Nagasaki and Hiroshima so fallout wouldn't be a perpetual issue.
We're also in an era where we're actually the most aware and the most proactive of environmental issues ever. In the 1950s, it was still considered totally acceptable in both the western world and the communist world to utterly destroy the environment. In America, rivers were so disgusting you'd get sick just standing next to them. In The USSR, the soviet union caused some of the largest environmental disasters in human history. Meanwhile, today even the Chinese are trying to clean up their act under intense pressure from their populations. Are we using more carbon today? Depends where you are, but in many countries the total carbon use is down and as the population declines the energy use will also decline. We're not in the same level of danger environmentally as we arguably were in the 1950s and 1960s either.
And to be clear about something, I don't need absolute confidence to be able to make this criticism, I just need confidence that their absolute confidence is misplaced. Big difference. I don't need to say everything is going to be fine and nothing bad will ever happen to say that it's stupid to attack a measurement indicating that we are predictably closer to the end of the world at this moment than ever before. An awful lot of bad things can happen -- including nuclear war or climate change -- without invoking doomsday.
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