Doom! We’re inching ever closer to…Doom!

The Doomsday Clock goes tick…tick…tick…

The global security and public policy magazine has adjusted the minute hand on the clock 19 times since its inception in 1947, to “convey how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction.” It was closest, according to the bulletin timeline — at 2 minutes to midnight – in 1953, when the United States “tested its first thermonuclear device. … Humanity was furthest away from doomsday, according to the bulletin — at 17 minutes to midnight — in 1991, after the Cold War officially ended. …

Bulletin authors today nudged the clock a minute closer to midnight (5 minutes to midnight), after moving it a little further from the end of humanity in 2010.

So you’re telling me, with 24 hours in a day, mankind has been no further than 17 minutes away from catastrophic destruction…since 1947?

We haven’t even gotten a half-hour away? Not twenty minutes? Seventeen minutes is the furthest we’ve been?

Seventeen? Out of one thousand, four hundred and forty?

Something is telling me there’s a problem with your methodology. Besides which, if we’ve been so close for so long, shouldn’t we have gone boom by now? I mean, the odds.

One more strange thing about this story:

If we’ve moved closer to Doom, why is that guy smiling?