[Image: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists / Facebook]
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has announced that the Doomsday Clock has been moved forward to 89 seconds to midnight. This is the closest to “Doomsday” it’s ever been.
The unique timepiece was created seventy-eight years ago as a symbolic attempt to gauge how close humanity is to destroying the world, with midnight representing the moment when people will have made the Earth uninhabitable.
For the last two years the clock has been set at 90 seconds to midnight, mainly because of the Ukraine/Russia war, the potential of a nuclear arms race, the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza, and the climate crisis. Although by no means a definitive countdown to our demise, the clock has rather served to spark conversations about difficult scientific topics such as climate change, according to the Bulletin.
“It’s an imperfect metaphor.”
Daniel Holz, the Bulletin’s science and security board chair and professor in the Department of Physics, Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, said “We set the clock closer to midnight because we do not see sufficient, positive progress on the global challenges we face, including nuclear risk, climate change, biological threats and advances in disruptive technologies.”
“Trends that have deeply concerned the Science and Security Board continued, and despite unmistakable signs of danger, national leaders and their societies have failed to do what is needed to change course. Consequently, we now move the Doomsday Clock from 90 seconds to 89 seconds to midnight—the closest it has ever been to catastrophe.”
During a news briefing Tuesday, Holz said that the countries that possess nuclear weapons are increasing the size of their arsenals and investing hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons that can destroy civilization many times over.”
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Besides the familiar threat of nukes, Holz also pointed to a “potent threat multiplier” – the spread of misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories, as a further reason why the clock has been set forward. These three issues “degrade the communication ecosystem and increasingly blur the line between truth and falsehood,” Holz added.
So, besides atom bombs and AI, humanity’s fondness for talking and believing too much k*k is now pushing us towards extinction.
Moving the clock back is however possible. The hand moved the farthest away from midnight — a whopping 17 minutes before the hour – when then-President George H.W. Bush’s administration signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviet Union in 1991.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded by a group of scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, the code name for the development of the atomic bomb during World War II. Originally, the organization was conceived to measure nuclear threats, but in 2007 it made the decision to include climate change in its calculations.
“While I wish we could go back to talking about minutes to midnight instead of seconds, unfortunately that no longer reflects reality.”
The clock has never reached midnight, and we all hope it never will. As Bulletin president Rachel Bronson says: “Because humans created these threats, we can reduce them.”
[Source: CNN]
