hat great reservoir of dispassionate truth known as the UK Daily
Mail has a calm, not-hyped-at-all story about the so-called
Doomsday Clock titled
“IS HUMANITY DOOMED? Doomsday Clock ticks forward . . .
moving humanity closer to annihilation than ever before.”
Maybe this “much anticipated” Clock is some kind of alien device set to blow up the Earth on command. That’s the only possible explanation for why anybody would ever pay attention to it. The alternative, that it’s just a goofy political attention-seeking gimmick, would mean it’s just an embarrassment to science.
The 60-foot-tall mutant ‘scientists’ at the Bulletin of ***THE*** (they always leave out the ‘the’) Atomic Scientists think we’re in danger from nuclear weapons, climate change, AI, and ‘mirror life.’
‘Mirror life’ is the creation of synthetic organisms designed to test theories about nature and evolution.
Now, of course all this is filtered through a media outlet, so it could be no more reliable than the reporter’s ability to get the name of the Society of Bullshittin’ Atomic Scientists right.
Most other papers are behind paywalls, which is a polite way of saying there’s a fat chance of me reading them. One paper that’s not says nothing about climate, only “failure of leadership” and “AI slop,” which the Bulletin evidently seeks to curtail with its hokey clock. According to Maria Pressa, who addressed the conference, it is “ticking.” In fact the organization itself is a stopped clock and so is their stupid clock.
If they really were ‘atomic scientists,’ you’d think they’d be using an atomic clock. That would keep time a lot better and it wouldn’t need to be reset all the time. Or at least they should give their clock a radium dial to make it more authentic.
Conservatives, citing the Bulletin’s nonsense about ‘nationalism’ being a threat, have noticed that the ‘clock’ always moves one way when Republicans are in power and the other way when Democrats are in power, suggesting that its mainspring is out of whack. But it seems to me the truth is far scarier: the Clock moves closer when it doesn’t get enough publicity. If people stop paying attention, it marches ominously toward armageddon, as if it’s a quantum device whose sole purpose is to generate an annual press release.
As for artificial life, the science experts at the Mail write:
However, many scientists fear the threat posed by these lab-made substances, as they are totally incompatible with normal DNA, raising the threat of an unstoppable pandemic.
Sigh . . . if it’s incompatible with ‘normal DNA,’ whatever that means, that means it can’t interact with Earth biology. The same is true of extraterrestrial bacteria and viruses. If they evolved in a non-Earth environment, that means they would not be adapted to our biosphere and would perish in our oxygen-, water-, and amino acid-rich environment almost instantly.
Either it’s a quantum-locked alien device or it’s a joke, part of a trend among humans to substitute appearance for reality. Ironically, that means it really is scary.
jan 28 2026, 05:46:01 am
