Signs of the end times

Some months ago, my brain offered me up this intrusive thought some months ago: “What would be the opposite of the Doomsday Clock?”

The first appearance of the Doomsday Clock, created for the Bulletin by the artist Martyl Langsdorf.

The Doomsday Clock, of course, is the famous design emblem that has been affixed to the masthead of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1947. Since 1949, the first time its time was changed, it has served as a way to indicate how close to “midnight” — annihilation — the clock changers believe we might be. It has never made pretensions of being a scientific instrument, it has always acknowledged itself as primarily a way for Bulletin experts (or its editor-in-chief, pre-1973) to signal to a broader world what they thought the global risk trend was. One can think about it how one wants, but it has undeniably been a potent cultural artifact since the 1940s.1

So what would the opposite of the Doomsday Clock be? I don’t know why my brain popped that into my consciousness, but it has been interesting to roll around in my thoughts.

One possibility: if the Doomsday Clock is a measure of how close one is to annihilation, would the opposite be something that measured how close one was to salvation? To utopia? To disarmament? A generally good time? This would be some kind of Anti-Doomsday Clock. Which might be just the same as flipping the meaning of the clock upside-down, and not that interesting.

Another approach would be to focus on the “Clock” side of things. A Doomsday Barometer? Thermometer? Telescope? Seismograph? Microscope? Some of these seem like they would be effectively the same as the Doomsday Clock, just a different visual metaphor. Some of them make little sense metaphorically, or require an imaginative stretch. A Doomsday Microscope, to allow you to see the eschatological implications of the very small things? A Doomsday Telescope, to see annihilation coming from far, far away?

Of course, a Doomsday Graph is all too clear:…