Doomsday Clock
Tuesday, January 28, 2020 10:05 AM
Defying all logic, the human race has not yet become extinct. Considering its penchant for self-destructive behavior, the human species would seem to challenge the factuality of Natural Selection as the key for its extant presence to date on the planet. Natural Selection describes the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype, otherwise the composite of an organism’s characteristics or traits. This includes the organism’s morphology (physical form and structure), its developmental processes, biochemical and physiological properties, behavioral causes and effects. Combined with an organism’s genetic code (genotype) and environmental factors, this dynamic of adaptive evolution fits an organism or organismic population to its environment. In short, this adaptation enables it to perpetuate itself, while other species fail and become extinct.
How we are still “fixed” to our planet, with our destructive history is a mystery. So much so that the Doomsday Clock is still stuck at 2 minutes to midnight, carried over from 2019. As Rachel Bronson, President of the 1Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the keeper of the internationally recognized Doomsday Clock, remarked at the National Press Club in Washington, “It’s a state as worrisome as the most dangerous times of the Cold War… This new abnormal is simply too volatile and too dangerous to accept as a continuing state of world affairs. Recognizing this grim reality, it is still two minutes to midnight – remaining the closest to midnight that the clock has ever been set.”
Bronson, made follow-up comments later to the Washington Post.
Here’s a bullet point summary of what she said :
• U.S.-Russian relations are near an all-time low
• The arms-control architecture is deteriorating
• Carbon emissions are rising after a period of plateauing
• Unresolved issues with North Korea President Trump’s
decision to abandon the nuclear deal with Iran
• The world’s nuclear nations proceeded with programs
of nuclear modernization… indistinguishable from a
worldwide arms race
• The military doctrines of Russia and the United States
have increasingly eroded the long-held taboo against
the use of nuclear weapons
• The intentional undermining of the information
architecture for political purposes
• The reckless use of language
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1 Nonprofit organization concerning science and global security issues resulting from accelerating technological advances that have negative consequences for humanity, founded by former Manhattan Project scientists as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of Chicago immediately following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima Nagasaki.
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The Washington Post
The Doomsday Clock is stuck at 2 minutes to ‘midnight,’
the symbolic hour of the apocalypse
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