Five minutes to Midnight.

Did you know there's a Doomsday Clock? If you've read The Watchmen*, you'll notice many references to it. Basically midnight represents catastrophic destruction of the planet. What a delightful thing for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to maintain! It was created in 1947 and set to 11:53pm. It's been set forward and backward depending on developments in the nuclear arms race. It is currently set at 11:55pm. A neat device no doubt, but there are many other catastrophic concerns in the world today. Recently, the Doomsday Clock is monitoring catastrophic environmental events as well.

As serious as nuclear winter and global warming are... there is a vast multitude of doomsday scenarios that are not being accounted for. The most obvious one is "giant rock from space". The Doomsday Clock can't account for asteroid collisions because the damn astronomers never seem to be able to tell people about these scenarios until it's too late. Seriously, why are we only finding out about this a day after it happens?

Another scenario that isn't on the radar is "death by robots". This scenario is discussed in detail with a song by Flight of the Conchords. Let's be honest, the robots of the future will not be lovable like AstroBoy. They will be angry angry killing machines.... though some of the angry angry killing machines will look a lot like AstroBoy. Some of the killer robots may be toasters. I'm not talking about Cylons... I mean actual disgruntled bread-toasting appliances intent on starting fires in kitchens. I would move the Doomsday Clock to 11:58pm if we were to take this into account.

Zombies, man! Don't tell me that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have not considered the threat of zombies! Surely scientists of such intellect would consider how dangerously tasty their big brains would be in the middle of a zombie outbreak. Well, if you aren't going to account for zombies on the Doomsday Clock, you guys can at least keep a stockpile of shotguns and chainsaws in the lab.

Have I missed a doomsday scenario? Let me know and I'll add it to the list.