Doomsday is coming ... if you don’t do what your mum says

With an air of grim finality, the Doomsday Clock was wheeled out this week and, as its name implies, it didn’t bode well.

We are 100 seconds from midnight. And midnight in this case does not mean a hooting owl or missing the last Metro home. It refers to humankind being wiped off the face of the planet, thanks to its sick lust for nuclear war and shrinkwrapped baked beans.

I know what you’re thinking: “100 seconds! That’s barely time to boil an egg.” Grab a banana instead. You’ve just about got enough time to peel it, dip it in that jar of Nutella and eke out three chomps before the Earth is swallowed up a grotesque fireball. On the plus side… the clock isn’t a real clock.

You don’t want to be using the Doomsday Clock to set your wristwatch, not least because it goes backwards and forwards.

Since its invention in 1947 the big hand has wavered between 17 minutes to midnight and last year’s disturbing two minutes to midnight.

As a thought-provoking device it has done a sterling job in focusing our minds on how close we have been to destroying our planet. Until this week, that is. While our stern-faced scientists are right to move the big hand closer to midnight, to issue the warning in seconds has diminished its impact.

It’s a bit like when you were a kid and your mother gave you ten seconds to tidy your room or your Angel Delight would be fed to the dog.

‘One, two, three...’ she’d start at a rate of knots with you racing around in a panic. She’d slow at ‘four, five, six” but you keep chucking toys in boxes and magazines under the bed. You are frantic at ‘Seven … eight … nine...” Images of your pet dog eating your pudding swim in your mind. And then she goes ‘Nine and a half...’ NINE AND A HALF? Suddenly, you have more time than you thought. In fact, after ‘nine and three quarters’ you relax. What next? ‘Nine and 22 one-hundredths!’ You just know your pudding is safe. So it is with the scientists and their Doomsday Clock. I suspect there is no warning. The dinosaurs were living the life of Riley just after tea (5.45pm) by the Doomsday Clock then, wham, wiped out by a meteorite.

A hundred seconds to midnight is not so much a portent of doom, but a metaphorical ticking off from your mum.