CHICAGO (SatireWire.com) — The Doomsday Clock, which gauges threats to humanity and is now set at just 5 minutes to midnight, will “spring forward” one hour in March to account for Daylight Savings Time, a decision scientists say will bring it in line with other official timepieces and unfortunately cause the world to end.
Maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago, the famous clock’s hands estimate the amount of time Earth has left before global destruction due to nuclear war, climate change and the like. Thanks to a campus-wide directive requiring all University of Chicago timepieces to be synchronized, the clock will be moved forward by one hour on March 11, 2012, meaning the hands will read 5 minutes before one in the morning, a solid 55 minutes too late for humanity.
Bulletin executive director Kennette Benedict said he wasn’t happy about the directive, and apologized for any inconvenience it may cause.
“We’ve never used Daylight Savings before, and I tried to argue that we can’t change this particular clock because of the danger, but you know how bureaucracies are,” Benedict explained. “I told them the world will end, and they were like, ‘All departments who fail to comply with this directive will have their budgets reviewed.’ Bastards.”
“I swear the only things to survive the apocalypse will be cockroaches and bureaucrats,” he added.
Although the clock has been adjusted 20 times since its inception in 1947, never has it been moved more than a few minutes. Bulletin board member Robert Socolow, an aerospace professor at Princeton University, advised people to stay calm and put the adjustment into perspective.
“Time changes are always slightly disorienting. This one will simply be infinitely moreso,” Socolow said. “You know how, every Spring, you set your clocks forward and then you wake up the next morning and think, ‘Damn, I’ve lost an hour’? Well, it’ll feel just like that. Except you’ll think, ‘Damn, I’ve lost everything.’ Including the ability to think.”
Fellow board member Allison Macfarlane, a professor at George Mason University, stressed the end could have been worse.
“I was always afraid we would die in a plague or a firestorm or something awful,” Macfarlane admitted. “But with this, we just move the hands and voila! We’re all dead.
“At least that’s what we assume will happen,” she said. “We should probably research it further, but there’s not enough time to get a government grant.”
Copyright © 2012, SatireWire.com
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