Tick Tock

Many scientists are convinced that in some far distant future the world will grow cold and there no longer will be life on this earth. Of course, we don’t find this threatening because it will take place millions or billions of years from now. What is threatening to us is all the talk about the imminent end of the world in a nuclear disaster. For example, the “Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” keeps us posted on this front by displaying a large clock that appears on its website. The clock’s hands indicate how close we are to midnight — the time when the cataclysmic event will come and civilization as we know it will end. For those who are not familiar with this clock, I can tell you that the hand has fluctuated since 1995 between two and fourteen minutes ’til midnight. It moves ahead or backward depending on the nuclear scientists’ interpretation of world conditions, and it’s frightening to note that we are currently clocking…