Jason mendez blog post 2

Prev

Blog Post 2: The Doomsday Clock

Society would change if there was a doomsday clock, there is no way to avoid that, the issue when discussing it is how society would react. The obvious answer would be to panic, and to descend into anarchy. Is this necessarily how it would work? The biggest factor for whether or not the clock would work depends on one key factor, the time frame. If the countdown to the end of the world was a week, the world would react very differently if the clock was a month, or a day. Imagine cooking something in a microwave. If the instructions are to cook something for thirty seconds, most people will stay in the kitchen, and wait for the food to cook. If it were a minute, one will probably get something to eat said food with in that time. The more time you add, the more stuff people will do. They will get something to drink, set a place to eat, or even just waste time playing on their phones, or even leave the kitchen entirely to go do something else as the food cooks. The same basic principle can be applied.

If the doomsday clock was set to a very short time, people couldn’t do very much. As the clock increases, the more “free time” humanity has. If the clock began counting down, and it says that there is a year until the end of the world, there would be panic, but the anarchy wouldn’t happen, at least not immediately. The same scenario can be seen in schools. At the beginning of ones’ senior yeah of high school, they have their graduation date in the back of their mind, and they continue schooling as if it doesn’t matter. As the year progresses, their focus on their graduation grows more and more. As the graduation is right around the bend, that is all that their focus. As the time grows closer, nothing else matters in the lives of the senior. The day of graduation, the final day, is all that matters to this person. Once that is within reach of the person, they don’t care about anything else.

This same principle is very similar to how a doomsday clock would work. The closer the date, the less productive a society will be. There will be outliers, such as those that don’t believe it, and those that kill themselves at the mention of the end of the world. This same mentality will be present if there is an end of the world. If there was a real doomsday clock, there would be panic at the beginning, but depending on the time set out by it, there would be panic, and there would be rioting. If the clock was put far enough into the future, there would also be calm afterward. The calm before the storm for lack of a better term. If a doomsday clock were to appear, the people would panic, and the people would be fear, but if it’s long enough away, society would continue as to be expected.