The Doomsday clock is a metaphor, not a measurement. When it began in the early days of the Cold War, the Doomsday Clock existed mainly to track and comment upon the political tension between the U.S. and the USSR, by far the two largest nuclear powers on Earth. It was designed to “frighten humanity into rationality,”
A nuclear war between Russia and the U.S. would have likely resulted in the complete destruction of life on Earth in a few hours, a concept that was new to people in 1947. So the clock worked: It was a shorthand way of illustrating how political decisions from two empires affected the likelihood of everyone dying.
But the Cold War has been over for decades, and the dangers we face now are very different than the ones we faced in 1964. Climate change is a looming catastrophe, but it won’t go down like a nuclear war, and the host of other threats enumerated by the clock won’t, by themselves, result in the death of humanity in a way we could likely predict.
The Doomsday Clock is not even a good metaphor on the most basic level. The defining characteristic of a timepiece is a hand moving inevitably forward to provides useful, objectively true information. The Doomsday Clock’s hand moves in both directions, and it provides nothing but an illustration of the subjective opinion of a small group of people.
Does the Doomsday Clock actually motivate people? For me, it’s the opposite. If I accept the idea that humanity is hair's breadth away from its end all I want to do is take a nap, not hear more about it: “If everything’s a crisis, nothing’s a crisis.” History is rife with unintended consequences, so who is to say whether the political assessments of the scientists who change the clock are even right?
I'm just amazed it hasn't already happened.
