![]() However, that's not quite accurate.Īfter spending three years set at 100 seconds to midnight, the hands of the Doomsday Clock ticked 10 seconds closer to global catastrophe in 2023. It's a powerful story, and for many years I thought this is what the Doomsday Clock meant: that its hands represented the time we have left before the end. It never crossed my mind that someday I might be working on the same problem, as a researcher at the Centre of the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. Then she contrasted this great swathe of history with how short our futures might be, and told us how a group of scientists in the US thought we may only have a few metaphorical minutes left until midnight. She told my class about the grand sweep of history, explaining that if everything that had happened on our planet was compressed into a single year, then life would have emerged in early March, multi-cellular organisms in November, dinosaurs in late-December – and humans wouldn't arrive on the scene until 23:30 on New Year’s Eve. After all, it’s in the name.I first became aware of the Doomsday Clock at school in the mid-1990s when a teacher introduced it to me. It should be no surprise that doomerism-the mindset that everything is hopeless and there’s nothing we can do in order to change catastrophe from things like climate change-and the Doomsday Clock would go hand-in-hand. Moreover, the Doomsday Clock might actually be doing the opposite of what’s intended and causing people to feel a sense of hopelessness with the state of the world. Rabinowitz once said that the clock was meant to “ frighten men into rationality.” The message is loud and clear from the Bulletin: Do something soon, or we’re all screwed.īut really, there hasn’t been a case throughout history of the Bulletin that we can point to where it seems like the Doomsday Clock has done very much of anything in order to meaningfully call attention to the dangers facing the world. ![]() We are no longer dealing in minutes until the end, but seconds. With each announcement, we’ve steadily inched closer to the end times. Since its peak in optimism in 1991, the clock has been updated 11 times. That said, the Doomsday Clock continues to be an exercise in futility, in which the Bulletin simply points out what many are already well aware of: It’s not going great, Bob. We’ve had a hard few years between the pandemic that won’t go away, a war in Europe threatening to pull the rest of the world into it, and compounding climate disasters that have claimed and changed the lives of people all over the world. At worst, things are just straight up a nightmarish hellscape for a lot of people. Things, at best, feel very dire right now. The Bulletin’s scientists do have a point with the Doomsday Clock. dissolved later that year and as close as 100 seconds to midnight in 2020 during the initial onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, runaway climate change disasters, and the end of a nuclear treaty between Russia and the U.S. Over the decades, the clock’s proximity to midnight-which is supposed to signify calamity for the human species-has fluctuated pretty wildly, moving as far as 17 minutes to midnight in 1991 after the Soviet Union signed an arms reduction treaty with the U.S. “It’s a number that’s arrived at by a group of people who are exploring each of the questions, then having a huge amount of discussion, and ultimately a convergence on a number. “It’s not scientific,” Lawrence Krauss, a physicist and chair of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, told The New Republic in 2018. While there are a host of considerations taken into account including the opinions and analysis from a panel of Nobel laureates and scientists, it’s kind of a collective group guess at the end of the day. In other words, the Bulletin’s scientists are mostly using vibes to come up with their predictions. Or, as co-founder and inaugural editor of the Bulletin Eugene Rabinowitch put it in 1967, “The Bulletin’s Clock is not a gauge to register the ups and downs of the international power struggle it is intended to reflect basic changes in the level of continuous danger in which mankind lives in the nuclear age, and will continue living, until society adjusts its basic attitudes and institutions.”
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