2024’s Doomsday Clock Stuck at 90 Seconds to Midnight — AI Could Tip It Over The Edge

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2024’s Doomsday Clock Stuck at 90 Seconds to Midnight — AI Could Tip It Over The Edge
By: KIONA SMITH - Inverse Science News - 01-23-24
Re: https://www.inverse.com/science/2024...to-midnight-ai

At least it's not getting worse?

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board opted not to move the hands of its Doomsday Clock on January 23, signaling that (as Inverse reported last year) the world is still pretty much a dumpster fire sitting next to a powder keg.

Since 1947, the Bulletin has published the Doomsday Clock to illustrate how close its board members think humanity is to destroying itself, using midnight as a metaphor for the end of the world. And for the second year in a row, the clock is hovering at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it's ever been.

“We could be facing catastrophe unless we better manage the technologies we've created,” said Bill Nye, who participated in the January 23 Doomsday Clock announcement.

Clock link: https://imgix.bustle.com/uploads/ima...mat%2Ccompress
The Doomsday Clock graphic debuted in 1947. The farthest from midnight the clock has ever been was 17 minutes, thanks to the end of the Cold War in 1991. The clock dropped from minutes to seconds for the first time in 2020.BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS

JUST HOW DOOMED ARE WE, ANYWAY?

There's no actual math behind the Doomsday Clock's annual setting; the "90 seconds" don't represent an actual countdown. Instead, the time is the Bulletin's way of illustrating how worried its Science and Security Board members are about humanity's current trajectory going massively lateral.

In 1945, several of the scientists who developed the atomic bomb founded a publication that they hoped would remind the public and elected officials of the dangers of nuclear war. They called it the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the Bulletin began publishing the Doomsday Clock two years later, in 1947. In 2007, the Bulletin decided to cover issues beyond its original subject matter of nuclear proliferation, including climate change, "disruptive technologies" like AI, and biological security.

Given that the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board is made up of some of the world's top experts in biosecurity, climate science, international relations, and other fields, it's worth paying attention when they say they're worried — especially when, for two years in a row, they say they're more worried than they've ever been.

So what's got this group of experts so worried? The two main culprits are worsening climate change and Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Additionally, 2023 was the hottest year on record (cue Homer Simpson reminding us that it’s just “the hottest year on record so far”), and the rising temperatures were accompanied by floods, wildfires, and extreme weather around the world.

The war in Ukraine, now approaching its second anniversary with no end in sight, is a potential flashpoint for nuclear conflict (or environmental disaster if nuclear power plants like Zaporizhizha get caught in the crossfire). Meanwhile, the board members also expressed concern that the U.S., Russia, and China may be ramping up toward a three-way nuclear arms race. Relations between the U.S. and Russia currently look like a throwback to the depths of the Cold War, with suspended or stalled nuclear weapons treaties.

Since October, the war in Gaza has been another potential flashpoint for even more widespread conflict.

But there's an unexpected twist in this year's Doomsday Clock announcement lurking behind the scenes: generative AI.

“AI has great potential to magnify disinformation and corrupt the information environment required to solve large global issues and on which democracy depends,” writes the Bulletin in its announcement. “AI-enabled disinformation efforts could be a factor that prevents the world from dealing effectively with nuclear risks, pandemics, and climate change.”

The idea behind the Doomsday Clock isn't just to call attention to how bad things are, though. Its goal is to encourage voters and policymakers to solve the problems the Bulletin's board members have pointed out.

As Bulletin CEO and president Rachel Bronson said during today's announcement, "The Bulletin remains hopeful — and inspired — in seeing the younger generations leading the charge."

Related Tags: Environment - Climate Crisis - Politics
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Another good report of interest (see below)

The First Pieces Of The World’s Largest Telescope Just Arrived In Chile — And They Are Gorgeous
You might even call it extremely large.

BY: KIONA SMITH - DEC. 27, 2023
Re: https://www.inverse.com/science/firs...ly-large-chile

Note: You might even call it extremely large.
Again by Kiona smith - 12-27-23
Photo link: https://imgix.bustle.com/uploads/ima...mat%2Ccompress

The first mirrors for the European Southern Observatory's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) arrived at the scope’s future home in Chile just in time for Christmas, but the unboxing process is going to take a while longer — and there's definitely some assembly required.

The 18 mirrors that sailed halfway around the world in late December are just the first of 798 hexagonal pieces that will eventually combine to form one, well, extremely large 128-foot-wide mirror. If everything goes according to plan, that giant mirror — the largest optical and infrared telescope mirror in the world — will start gathering light from alien worlds, ancient galaxies, and supermassive black holes in 2028.

HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS OF HEXAGONS
Even with the best modern glassworking facility, casting a telescope mirror larger than about 26 feet wide is still impractical. Most of the world’s largest telescopes have main mirrors that are really assemblies of many smaller mirrors, carefully aligned and mounted on a frame. Each of the ELT's mirror segments is about 4.5 feet wide and less than two inches thick. The surface of the glass has to be perfectly smooth, and the margin for error is astronomically tiny: less than one-thousandth the width of a human hair.

"To achieve the required optical performance, the segments must be figured with a precision within fractions of the light wavelength. The average required surface quality of the segments is 15 nanometers," Marc Cayrel, optomechanics project manager for the ELT, tells Inverse. "The full width of a human hair is about 70,000 nanometers."

The mirror segments traveled from a manufacturing facility in Germany, where the glass gets cast, to another facility in France, where it's polished with a microscopic beam of ions, which, as the ESO puts it, "sweeps the mirror surface and removes irregularities atom by atom." This technique, called ion beam figuring, has been used on lots of other telescope mirrors, including those of the Keck Observatory in Hawai'i and the Gran Telescopio Canarias on the island of La Palma.

"The challenge has been to industrialize the existing techniques and processes so that the segments can be mass produced (to about one per day after ramp-up)," says Cayrel.

Each batch of mirrors, starting with the first 18, will have a long sea journey from France to Chile, and then a much shorter drive across the Atacama Desert to their eventual home atop Cerro Amazones.

Forget bubble-wrap and express mail: The mirrors must be shipped in temperature-controlled containers equipped with special air cushions, and each segment is tucked in a special bag filled with dry nitrogen to protect the thin sheets of glass from warping due to humidity or condensation, then installed on motion-dampers inside the container to protect it from vibrations, bumps, and other shocks.

"Although we maximize the protections of the segments, the maritime containers are transported to Chile using common commercial ships and routes," says Cayrel. "The risk of damage is normally very low."

GIFT-WRAPPING IN SHINY SILVER
Now that they're in Chile, the mirror segments still need to be carefully coated with an extremely thin — 150 nanometers — layer of silver. The Very Large Telescope, an array of four 8.2-meter telescopes atop nearby Cerro Paranal, also managed by the European Southern Observatory (which definitely has a consistent naming system), uses aluminum for its mirrors' shiny metal coating.

"By using a more reflective silver coating, the ELT will be able to gather more light — allowing ESO astronomers to observe the night sky in astonishing detail," says Cayrel.

The silver coating will stick to the mirrors' meticulously polished glass thanks to a technique called magnetron sputtering, which involves — to put it in very simple terms — applying a super-thin, super-smooth layer of silver to the mirror's surface in a vacuum.

Once coated, the first 18 mirror segments will then have to wait patiently for their 780 siblings to join them. Once they are all together, all and then all 798 glass-and-silver hexagons will be carefully aligned to form the primary mirror of the ELT. That mirror will capture light from distant objects and reflect it onto a secondary mirror which, in turn, will reflect it onto instruments that will help astronomers make sense out of all those pixels.

Related tags: Astronomy & Space Science.
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Personal note: We never get tired of looking into space and star formations do we!?
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