Doomsday Clock, that helpfully terrifying visualization of our species’ relative proximity to all-out self-extinction, granddaddy to the 24 clock and all the other ticking A-bombs of Armageddon that pop culture has placed lovingly on the bedside tables of our cowering psyches. The clock was set at seven minutes to midnight, and it’s been changed just 19 times since then.

The earliest we’ve managed to set it back: 17 minutes to midnight. That was in 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. The latest it’s gotten: two minutes till, during an exchange of US and Soviet H-bomb tests in 1953. (The Cuban missile crisis came and went too quickly for the clock-keepers to respond.) Today, we stand at six minutes to midnight; climate change and “biosecurity” have been added desultorily to the clock’s eschatological workings. (But nobody has addressed the daylight-savings-time question. Is it spring forward or fall back? And is it OK to wear lead after Labor Day?)

As meme, metaphor, and instrument of civic awareness, the Doomsday Clock is unmatched. But as a clock, it’s a total failure. It’s really a gauge, not a timepiece—what self-respecting nonquantum chronometer rides back and forth over the same patch of time for 50 years, anyway? Its website, Turnbacktheclock.org, features imagery and a domain name meant to suggest the difficulty, maybe even the impossibility, of the task. To turn back the clock you would need a miracle—or at least a flux capacitor.

Sure, I appreciate the purpose of the Doomsday Clock: to shame or frighten powerful, feckless dolts in leadership positions, who enjoy brandishing fistfuls of plutonium (or coal subsidies) when politics don’t go their way. Problem is, powerful, feckless dolts aren’t afraid of clocks. They’re afraid of sex scandals and angry peasants—in that order. Clocks frighten only normal, powerless people like you and me, in the hope that we’ll de-elect and/or assassinate the powerful, feckless dolts. We do, and they’re instantly replaced with new dolts, and the clock ticks on in nerve-racking nonsense-time.

We can’t seem to do anything about nuclear weapons, climate change, or responsible biotech regulation. So I propose we do something about the Doomsday Clock. Detonating the damned thing and starting anew comes to mind. For one thing, we need an instrument that measures a wider variety of potential apocalyptic scenarios: preventable asteroid collision, mass smartphone-brain-tumor die-off, moon-based casino snafu, and my personal favorite, killer zom-bees. (They’re zombie bees—hadn’t thought of those, had you?)

Second, we have to liberate ourselves from the toothless time metaphor. After more than half a century, the chrono-imagery and its threat of consequences has lost credibility. Not that the dread itself has abated—we all feel just as globally imperiled as ever—but the metrics are in limbo. So I’d suggest a Doom Queue, with a host of globe-killing catastrophes jockeying for slot number one, moving closer, then farther away, like Johnny Mnemonic in my Netflix lineup. Users can even rate their picks for most likely apocalypse.

In fact, a user-sourced Doom Queue, properly executed, would be ideal: It would do more than predict The End; it would organize our collective anxieties into a plan of action. And that illusion of control is so very important for the healthy psychology of a free (and frightened) society, even a doomed one. Otherwise, we’re just a bunch of clock-watchers, waiting for the midnight hour.

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Authors: Scott Brown

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