Doomsday Clock

SoonerAviator

SoonerAviator

Final Approach
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SoonerAviator
Anyone still pay attention to the annual "Doomsday Clock" anymore? Seems like it's been less than 10 minutes to midnight for a couple of decades now, lol. I feel like most people are pretty inured to the threat of nuclear winter at this point when their mechanism for showing the threat is always on DEFCON 1.
 
I've never paid any attention to that thing.... just a gimick trying to illustrate a point....no so unlike those clocks that show deaths, or births, etc....

but along these lines
My sister just yesterday turned me onto some podcast discussing ancient civilizations...and all the ancient apocalypses that have happened....
the idea being that there have been civilizations of people in the past that were advanced...maybe as advanced as we are today...or maybe even more advanced
then some meteors hit, &/or the magnetic poles flop, &/or.... and eons of time grind all of our "permanence" into dust buried under sediment
a few people maybe survive but they are thrown back to caveman living trying to shove any food they can find into their mouth and trying to survive till they are 12-15 years old.... then over thousands of years we've evolved (or devolved?) into what we are today.....
maybe rinse....repeat.....
seems wako conspiracy theory on the surface but there is evidence that make it seem plausible when you look deep....

Even if it's not plausible, it's a very interesting thought game that kind puts the futility of what we do everyday fighting against enropy, into perspective. How our individual lives are not even a blip in time.
 
I don't see a reason to pay attention to them.

In 1962, they didn't even react to the Cuban Missile Crisis, when our time away from nuclear war was measured in seconds. There were 4 or 5 soviet submarines operating in the vicinity of our blockading ships, each carrying one nuclear torpedo capable of destroying an entire carrier group in one shot. Because of superior analysis of radio signals, we knew the areas they were in and searched for them, forcing the soviets to stay submerged. On the verge of running out of air and being forced up, one of the soviet submarine captains tried to launch their nuclear torpedo. Either the XO or political officer argued with him and the captain passed out from lack of oxygen during the argument. The officers surfaced the ship and essentially ended their mission by giving away their position. If they had 30 seconds more, the captain would have had the other officer subdued and launched.
 
Lycosaurus said:
Is that what they call a "choke hold" now?
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No. The submarine had been down so long the O2 level was too low and he passed out on his own. Until nuclear submarines delivered enough power to make their own oxygen, diesel submarines could stay down maybe 2-3 days at the most before they had to surface and change out the air. Soviet boats of the era might have been even shorter.

They could bleed O2 into the air and use CO2 absorbent to extend the time, but eventually there's just nothing left to breathe.
 
bflynn said:
In 1962, they didn't even react to the Cuban Missile Crisis, when our time away from nuclear war was measured in seconds. There were 4 or 5 soviet submarines operating in the vicinity of our blockading ships, each carrying one nuclear torpedo capable of destroying an entire carrier group in one shot.
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Sounds like suicide.

Yeah, that Doomsday Clock has been flickering near midnight for more than 50 years. That alone blunts its effect on us older folks. When we were young we did the same thing young folks today are doing: we blamed our elders for getting us into the Cold War.
 
Sounds like normalization of deviation. Just because we've been close for a long time doesn't mean we aren't close. Nothing has changed to make doomsday less likely, so turning back the clock doesn't make sense. Does it matter to our daily lives? Not really.
 
Brad W said:
I've never paid any attention to that thing.... just a gimick trying to illustrate a point....no so unlike those clocks that show deaths, or births, etc....

but along these lines
My sister just yesterday turned me onto some podcast discussing ancient civilizations...and all the ancient apocalypses that have happened....
the idea being that there have been civilizations of people in the past that were advanced...maybe as advanced as we are today...or maybe even more advanced
then some meteors hit, &/or the magnetic poles flop, &/or.... and eons of time grind all of our "permanence" into dust buried under sediment
a few people maybe survive but they are thrown back to caveman living trying to shove any food they can find into their mouth and trying to survive till they are 12-15 years old.... then over thousands of years we've evolved (or devolved?) into what we are today.....
maybe rinse....repeat.....
seems wako conspiracy theory on the surface but there is evidence that make it seem plausible when you look deep....

Even if it's not plausible, it's a very interesting thought game that kind puts the futility of what we do everyday fighting against enropy, into perspective. How our individual lives are not even a blip in time.
Click to expand...

There would be some evidence somewhere. I mean we can tell what the atmosphere content was from rocks. There would be pollution or something that shows up in the strata somewhere.
 
EdFred said:
Ha. That's awesome. I don't use Google unless in private mode. They get enough info.
Click to expand...

Sorry to burst your bubble, but...

Google Private does not prevent sending information to our Google overlords. Its function is to not store the information on your computer. From Google Support:

Is Google private browsing really private?

In Incognito, none of your browsing history, cookies and site data, or information entered in forms are saved on your device. This means your activity doesn't show up in your Chrome browser history, so people who also use your device won't see your activity.
​
I would certainly appreciate it if someone could prove me wrong.

Either way, "I, for one, welcome our new overlords"
 
EdFred said:
Evidence for advanced civilization. Not for asteroid impacts. I read an article recently that stated we may even know what time of year the Chicxulub impact happened.
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Thought to have been in springtime. And when I Googled that, and also saw the cool thing Google does when you search on Chicxulub, a saw the list of common searches on the topic.

One was “How did humans survive the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs?” :rolleyes:
 
Lycosaurus said:
Sorry to burst your bubble, but...

Google Private does not prevent sending information to our Google overlords. Its function is to not store the information on your computer. From Google Support:

Is Google private browsing really private?

In Incognito, none of your browsing history, cookies and site data, or information entered in forms are saved on your device. This means your activity doesn't show up in your Chrome browser history, so people who also use your device won't see your activity.
​
I would certainly appreciate it if someone could prove me wrong.

Either way, "I, for one, welcome our new overlords"
Click to expand...
That is correct. Private/incognito modes affect your local resources. Your service provider can see what you're doing, and the websites you visit can see that you're visiting them.

One way that it can affect external processes are those sites that use the same cookies that are stored on your device. Like when you see ads on unrelated websites for things that you shopped for on Amazon - one useful function of private mode is so that your wife doesn't inadvertently see what you're getting her for her birthday. Or a sexy gift that she's expecting because the ad showed up on her browser, but then she never gets it because it was for your secretary instead.
 
Lycosaurus said:
Sorry to burst your bubble, but...

Google Private does not prevent sending information to our Google overlords. Its function is to not store the information on your computer. From Google Support:

Is Google private browsing really private?

In Incognito, none of your browsing history, cookies and site data, or information entered in forms are saved on your device. This means your activity doesn't show up in your Chrome browser history, so people who also use your device won't see your activity.
​
I would certainly appreciate it if someone could prove me wrong.

Either way, "I, for one, welcome our new overlords"
Click to expand...

I don't use Chrome. And I know Google still gets the info because how else would it return search results for you. It's just not tied to me. Yes, A computer at this IP address looked for something, but could be anyone.
 
bflynn said:
I don't see a reason to pay attention to them.

In 1962, they didn't even react to the Cuban Missile Crisis, when our time away from nuclear war was measured in seconds. There were 4 or 5 soviet submarines operating in the vicinity of our blockading ships, each carrying one nuclear torpedo capable of destroying an entire carrier group in one shot. Because of superior analysis of radio signals, we knew the areas they were in and searched for them, forcing the soviets to stay submerged. On the verge of running out of air and being forced up, one of the soviet submarine captains tried to launch their nuclear torpedo. Either the XO or political officer argued with him and the captain passed out from lack of oxygen during the argument. The officers surfaced the ship and essentially ended their mission by giving away their position. If they had 30 seconds more, the captain would have had the other officer subdued and launched.
Click to expand...

That sounds so Hunt for Red October.
 
Sac Arrow said:
That sounds so Hunt for Red October.
Click to expand...

More like “Crimson Tide”
(no, it’s not a football movie).

Crimson Tide (1995) - IMDb

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112740/

“On a U.S. nuclear missile sub, a young First Officer stages a mutiny to prevent his trigger happy Captain from launching his missiles before confirming his orders to do so.”
 
I don't think it's a given that a nuke torpedo in Cuba would have started ww3. Cuba was pretty much a game of chicken. As I understand it, we claimed we won, because they pulled the missiles out. Khrushchev privately said to Castro that they won, because Cuba still existed. Meanwhile, after Russia pulled the missiles out of Cuba, we pulled our intermediate range nuclear missiles out of Europe within the year.

Am I glad we didn't find out, and the Russians didn't launch? Yep! But I think I was 2 at the time, so not really aware of the significance.

Anyway, I don't think any doomsday clock has any relevance, unless it's a population count clock. I don't think we're going to destroy ourselves in any big bang. I think it'll be slowly, as we continue to occupy a larger and larger percentage of the planet.
 
SoonerAviator said:
Anyone still pay attention to the annual "Doomsday Clock" anymore? Seems like it's been less than 10 minutes to midnight for a couple of decades now, lol. I feel like most people are pretty inured to the threat of nuclear winter at this point when their mechanism for showing the threat is always on DEFCON 1.
Click to expand...

Just saw this yesterday and made me laugh.
 

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ChopAndDrop said:
More like “Crimson Tide”
(no, it’s not a football movie).

Crimson Tide (1995) - IMDb

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112740/

“On a U.S. nuclear missile sub, a young First Officer stages a mutiny to prevent his trigger happy Captain from launching his missiles before confirming his orders to do so.”
Click to expand...

Right, I liked that movie too but in Hunt for Red October, Captain Ramius kills the political officer.
 
Albany Tom said:
Anyway, I don't think any doomsday clock has any relevance, unless it's a population count clock. I don't think we're going to destroy ourselves in any big bang. I think it'll be slowly, as we continue to occupy a larger and larger percentage of the planet.
Click to expand...
Idk. There's been a few times where a few ppl stopped the chain of events. The operator who saw a lone missile on the scope and correctly determined it to be an error if you will.

Maybe it's time to accept that this is our "Great Filter".
 
The only doomsday clock I pay attention to is the IRS filing deadline although it also doesn’t really mean anything either.
 
Sac Arrow said:
That sounds so Hunt for Red October.
Click to expand...

Weird - I just was given an copy of a naval history magazine from last October and the story was in there too. Vasili Arkhipov was the officer who saved things, but the details were slightly different. I didn't remember that in addition to being the sub's political officer, he was also the flotilla commander for the 4 submarines in the area. The magazine didn't say the captain passed out which I heard second hand from someone who knew Arkhipov. Instead, it says Arkhipov convinced the captain to surface and verify; they believed a war had started because the US Navy was dropping signaling depth charges...too small to cause any damage, but if you're the one in sub, it probably doesn't matter. The sub was the B-59, a Foxtrot diesel boat. If you're the LA area, there's one displayed as a museum with the Queen Mary.

Lots of information on the web
 
The Ruskies don’t like Western tanks going to the Ukrainians. I guess it’s time to check supplies in the bunker.
 
I think we are quietly closer than we have been for decades, if not ever. But that is based on the assumption that we don't know what Putin will/would do. If he is saner than I imagine, I'll walk back that statement. But if he is dumb enough to resort to nuclear arms, we will likely barely know about it before WWIII kicks off (and ends about as fast as it starts).
 
Pi1otguy said:
The real question. If MAD happens do you want to survive it?
For me, I'm not sure.
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Working on a DOD facility, my plan is to go up on the rooftop and wait for the second sun. I have already told my wife that if WWIII start while I am at work, don’t expect me home for dinner. And don't forget to take the KI tablets.
 
Morgan3820 said:
Working on a DOD facility, my plan is to go up on the rooftop and wait for the second sun.
Click to expand...
I work in a major city and live near a critical freeway interchange. I expect to be in the second sun. :dunno:
 
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