Tick Tock

“I would only agree that a symbolic clock is as nourishing to the intellect as a photograph of oxygen to a drowning man.”

David Hayter, Alex Tse – Watchmen, 2009

 

We find ourselves living in an especially unique time in human history with casual access to essentially infinite information, the ability to make use of almost limitless tools of communication, and increasing access to otherworldly technologies. We hold computers in our pockets that are more advanced than the ones that helped guide us to the moon, and we can exchange ideas with our fellow man from across the planet with them. Progress and possibility, however, aren’t what make this such a special time in human history. What truly sets us apart from our ancestors is our impending Doomsday.

As we marvel at the fantastic world we live in, we ignore the threats brought about by our affinity for destruction and continue to spin the gears of war that power the Doomsday Clock. We face two crises that could bring about the extinction of the human race—prospects of nuclear warfare, and climate change—and yet, even in the face of the greatest threats the entirety of the human race has ever seen, our world leaders seem to be ready to watch us burn alive. 

From 1942-1946, an international group of scientists worked on the Manhattan Project to create the world’s first nuclear weapons.

In 1945, a group of many of the same scientists founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and stated that “[they] could not remain aloof to the consequences of their work.”

In 1947, with those consequences in mind, these individuals began distributing a magazine where the Doomsday Clock—a clock meant to exemplify the urgency associated with threats of extinction to the human race with midnight representing a global catastrophe— made its first appearance.

In 1953, the clock came closer to midnight than any other point in history: 2 minutes from midnight as the United States and Soviet Union tested hydrogen bombs less than 9 months apart. “Only a few more swings of the pendulum, and, from Moscow to Chicago, atomic explosions will strike midnight for Western civilization.” the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists declared.

Every year the clock changes position as world affairs pull us closer and farther away from self-destruction, and since its inception, the clock has pointed its hands at both bright futures and grim prospects.

As we enjoy the brightness of our time do we ignore how grim things may be?

One major alteration to the Doomsday Clock has been the acknowledgment of climate change as one of the great threats to mankind, and the scientific community agrees that the climate crisis is getting worse by the day. The statistics are both staggering and widely available concerning the seriousness of climate change, but we have major political parties and world leaders denying the science fully or bringing about insignificant measures to put a band-aid on an ever widening wound.

Increasingly powerful corporations view climate change as a simple externality. Such logic causes large economic powers to operate in a way that puts profit before people and planet. These ill-gotten gains often go unimpeded because such an urgent crisis facing us all is oftentimes an afterthought at best in our political conversations.

Climate change is a major threat to the planet, our leaders largely ignore the problem, and the population says little of it. We are not simply watching the world die out slowly; we’re killing it more quickly by the day. 

Climate change is the slow burn killing mankind, while nuclear stockpile is our final blaze of glory in the makings. Since the creation and usage of the first atomic bombs, the world has found itself in an arms race to amass planet shaking weapons and bring us to the finish line. We’ve made a great deal of progress racing towards midnight. There are roughly 15,500 nuclear warheads worldwide with 90% belonging to Russia and the U.S.—the two superpowers that seem to be perpetually on the cusp of war. In many of the years, we have found ourselves closest to Doomsday, America and Russia were literal minutes away from waging nuclear warfare against one another.

Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to act as confrontational as possible with the world’s largest nuclear stockpile while President Barack Obama presented a plan to spend $1trillion on modernizing our nuclear weapons, he received a Nobel Peace Prize for his commitment to eliminating nuclear weapons. Such unreasonable, unnecessary, and unjust military action may just be our undoing as we continue to support candidates who carry out adventures of death across the world. Our so-called leaders not only destabilize regions, but agitate allies and enemies alike, and escalate conflicts to a point that can only end in nuclear warfare and mass death.  We have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet several times over, but we seem to forget that we only have one planet to destroy. 

Beginning in 2015, and still today, we find ourselves 3 minutes from midnight— our second lowest point since the inception of the concept. We must ask ourselves how we’ve come so closely to destroying one another, ignoring the obvious threat of climate destruction, and allowing the nuclear age to persist. We have bloated military budgets to fund agitation and murder across the world, and create more war and terrorism daily. We have major political parties and portions of the population that deny or ignore the growing threat of an uninhabitable planet being passed on to our children. We continue to overfund global conflicts of escalation and find ourselves underfunding efforts to combat climate change. We need a vast reimagining of our foreign policy and a well-reasoned shift in our priorities, but we also need to hold candidates to increasingly higher standards on issues of war, peace, and planet.

While living in a time of unbelievable prosperity with great prospects of progress, we cannot ignore the looming human errors that may end us all. We hear from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist in 2016, “The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon.’ That probability has not been reduced. The Clock ticks. Global danger looms. Wise leaders should act—immediately.”

As we sit 3 minutes from midnight, staring down extinction, it’s high time we stop peeking at the Doomsday Clock and extinguish the fires we have been fueling.