Doomsday Clock 2024 time update says humanity is as close as ever to global catastrophe

Rapidcreek@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 145 points –
Doomsday Clock 2024 time update says humanity is as close as ever to global catastrophe
usatoday.com
39

You are viewing a single comment

It broke in the 90's. History was "over" so they kind of adjusted the scale, and now that shit's real again they keep having to shave off tiny increments closer and closer to midnight.

We're still way better off than during the Cuban missile crisis, imminent existential risk-wise.

Yeah but the Cuban Missile Crisis was theoretically solvable in a short time period and none of our current problems are.

I guess the crisis itself could be and was, but at the time nobody was really talking about the concept of a cold war, and the nuclear threat stayed heightened for decades. Actually, opinions vary on how long a nuclear-power conflict can reliably stay cold, even now.

AI and nuclear war seem like the main direct threats right now. Climate change will suck and I'll miss coral reefs, but it's not planet killing unless it sets something else more deliberate off. The world looks unstable, but I'm not expecting WWIII this year, and AI isn't going to be very dangerous by 2025 either. The Cuban missile crisis should have ended the world as we know it in the span of a few months. We basically just won a few coin flips in a row; I bet other parallel universes weren't so lucky.

but it's not planet killing

That’s cool except no one is arguing about it killing the planet. What it will do is kill our environment which is the part that determines the survival of our species.

It's not environment-killing either, at least as far as growing wheat and tomatoes is concerned. Environment-damaging, sure, but we could potentially starve a lot of people and keep going (though we shouldn't!), and it's not even clear agricultural output will go down rather than just relocating.

Don't get me wrong, I like having wild animals besides rats and flies, and I don't love the idea of a giant global mass-migration crisis as Bangladesh sinks into the sea and we fight over farmland in what used to be an icecap, so I still think we need to crack down on fossil fuels a lot harder. We're pretty adaptable, though, and some sad little human world will exist on the other side if that's all.

Tell that to the crop failures.

Not only is your opinion absolutely wrong but it’s a dangerous one too because it removes the need to change and to do so quickly.

This is why nothing will ever change and why humans will continue polluting and destroying our habitat.

Humans are fucking stupid.

Crops in western America might fail, but the whole world isn't America. Yields move, and 2023-2024 was a record harvest globally.

Don't take my word for it, there's an actual scientist elsewhere in the thread.

Humans are fucking stupid.

Well, we can agree on that. The human reaction to "the world is ending" is usually giving up. Which is why we shouldn't say that unless the science supports that, which it doesn't quite.