Just for grins, on the infectious deaths front, I was playing around with a recent version of ChatGPT and asking it about deaths. And it actually gave me decent sources (which is NOT what it used to do, the sources were non-existent or red herrings). Anyway, viruses carry away about 9 million people a year, bacteria almost 8 million, fungi about 2.6 million (most of those are immune compromised) and protozoa less than a million. The latter two categories pretty much cover deaths due to eukaryotic parasites (including malaria). There is some crossover.
Al, I like your rubrics because they're rubrics. If you don't have rules--as you point out--everything is subjective and nobody knows how they are *really* deciding anything other than "I feel anxious about X, Y, and Z". This is one of the insights I got from reading "Thinking Fast and Slow".
I get all the Bulletin emails (they're kind of a burden) and I've had the same thoughts. The cynical me says, "This is a fundraising ploy." but they've got good people there so it can't be ALL fundraising.
There are a lot of really smart people working on "mirror life". I've been doing biodefense/infectious diseases for nearly three decades and I'm uncertain of the implications for it. It might not even be a thing. If it is mirror life, it seems as if it couldn't touch our immune system (which all bad microbes need to do to be bad) but that isn't to say our immune system couldn't touch the mirror life. So it might not be a threat at all.
I like the Bulletin and its articles because there aren’t a lot of places for people interested in unconventional weapons to go. I would never accuse them of scaremongering for fundraising but some of them are idealistic or not seeing how govt policy works.
Breaking these threats into seperate clocks with objective metrics is spot on. When everything gets lumped into one symbolic gesture, people tune out because they can't actually process what it means. I noticed the same thing hapepning with climate dashboards at work where combining too many metrics just made decisionmakers glaze over. The specific math here (like 30 seconds per hundred alerted warheads) gives people something concrete to track.
This piece really made me think about the gravity of the Doomsday Clock, it's such a stark remindr of our collective responsibility, especially with the mention of AI's disruptive potential. I'm curious, could you elaborate a bit more on the "Golden Dome" and its destabilizing effects? That part was quite intriguing and seems like a critical piece of the puzzle.
The debate on Golden Dome goes to the issue of whether a national missile defense program is worth the investment. One side says that missile defense is necessary to protect against an accidental or deliberate nuke strike. The other side points out that adversaries (China and Russia) will merely build more nuclear missiles to overwhelm missile defense. So if the development of Golden Dome causes increased missile builds in China and Russia, that’s destabilizing to strategic relations between the US and these countries.
Essentially the argument is that China and Russia think the US is building missile defense so that the US can threaten them with a first strike (because the US will deflect the retaliatory strike). So they might strike the US before Golden Dome is up. The missile defense fans disagree and say it’s only meant to save America.
Given the cost of Golden Dome and the increased tensions that will occur, I agree that it’s not worth the expense. And it increases the count toward midnight on the Clock.
Just for grins, on the infectious deaths front, I was playing around with a recent version of ChatGPT and asking it about deaths. And it actually gave me decent sources (which is NOT what it used to do, the sources were non-existent or red herrings). Anyway, viruses carry away about 9 million people a year, bacteria almost 8 million, fungi about 2.6 million (most of those are immune compromised) and protozoa less than a million. The latter two categories pretty much cover deaths due to eukaryotic parasites (including malaria). There is some crossover.
Al, I like your rubrics because they're rubrics. If you don't have rules--as you point out--everything is subjective and nobody knows how they are *really* deciding anything other than "I feel anxious about X, Y, and Z". This is one of the insights I got from reading "Thinking Fast and Slow".
I get all the Bulletin emails (they're kind of a burden) and I've had the same thoughts. The cynical me says, "This is a fundraising ploy." but they've got good people there so it can't be ALL fundraising.
There are a lot of really smart people working on "mirror life". I've been doing biodefense/infectious diseases for nearly three decades and I'm uncertain of the implications for it. It might not even be a thing. If it is mirror life, it seems as if it couldn't touch our immune system (which all bad microbes need to do to be bad) but that isn't to say our immune system couldn't touch the mirror life. So it might not be a threat at all.
I like the Bulletin and its articles because there aren’t a lot of places for people interested in unconventional weapons to go. I would never accuse them of scaremongering for fundraising but some of them are idealistic or not seeing how govt policy works.
Breaking these threats into seperate clocks with objective metrics is spot on. When everything gets lumped into one symbolic gesture, people tune out because they can't actually process what it means. I noticed the same thing hapepning with climate dashboards at work where combining too many metrics just made decisionmakers glaze over. The specific math here (like 30 seconds per hundred alerted warheads) gives people something concrete to track.
This piece really made me think about the gravity of the Doomsday Clock, it's such a stark remindr of our collective responsibility, especially with the mention of AI's disruptive potential. I'm curious, could you elaborate a bit more on the "Golden Dome" and its destabilizing effects? That part was quite intriguing and seems like a critical piece of the puzzle.
The debate on Golden Dome goes to the issue of whether a national missile defense program is worth the investment. One side says that missile defense is necessary to protect against an accidental or deliberate nuke strike. The other side points out that adversaries (China and Russia) will merely build more nuclear missiles to overwhelm missile defense. So if the development of Golden Dome causes increased missile builds in China and Russia, that’s destabilizing to strategic relations between the US and these countries.
Essentially the argument is that China and Russia think the US is building missile defense so that the US can threaten them with a first strike (because the US will deflect the retaliatory strike). So they might strike the US before Golden Dome is up. The missile defense fans disagree and say it’s only meant to save America.
Given the cost of Golden Dome and the increased tensions that will occur, I agree that it’s not worth the expense. And it increases the count toward midnight on the Clock.