(WASHINGTON) — Scientists and global leaders revealed on Tuesday that the “Doomsday Clock” has been reset to the closest humanity has ever come to self-annihilation.
For the first time in three years, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the metaphorical clock up one second to 89 seconds before midnight, the theoretical doomsday mark.
“It is the determination of the science and security board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that the world has not made sufficient progress on existential risks threatening all of humanity. We thus move the clock forward,” Daniel Holz, chair of the organization’s science and security board, said during a livestreamed unveiling of the clock’s ominous new time.
“In setting the clock closer to midnight, we send a stark signal,” Holz said. “Because the world is already perilously closer to the precipice, any move towards midnight should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning. Every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster.”
For the last two years, the clock has stayed at 90 seconds to midnight, with scientists citing the ongoing war in Ukraine and an increase in the risk of nuclear escalation as the reason.
Among the reasons for moving the clock one second closer to midnight, Holz said, were the further increase in nuclear risk, climate change, biological threats, and advances in disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence.
“Meanwhile, arms control treaties are in tatters and there are active conflicts involving nuclear powers. The world’s attempt to deal with climate change remain inadequate as most governments fail to enact financing and policy initiatives necessary to halt global warming,” Holz said, noting that 2024 was the hottest year ever recorded on the planet.
“Advances in an array of disruptive technology, including biotechnology, artificial intelligence and in space have far outpaced policy, regulation and a thorough understanding of their consequences,” Holz said.
Holtz said all of the dangers that went into the organization’s decision to recalibrate the clock were exacerbated by what he described as a “potent threat multiplier”: The spread of misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories “that degrade the communication ecosystem and increasingly blur the line between truth and falsehood.”
What is the Doomsday Clock?
The Doomsday Clock was designed to be a graphic warning to the public about how close humanity has come to destroying the world with potentially dangerous technologies.
The clock was established in 1947 by Albert Einstein, Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer, and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons as part of the Manhattan Project. Created less than two years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, during World War II, the clock was initially set at seven minutes before midnight.
Over the past seven decades, the clock has been adjusted forward and backward multiple times. The farthest the minute hand has been pushed back from the cataclysmic midnight hour was 17 minutes in 1991, after the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty was revived and then-President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev announced reductions in the nuclear arsenals of their respective countries.
For the past 77 years, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit media organization comprised of world leaders and Nobel laureates, has announced how close it believes the world is to collapse due to nuclear war, climate change and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.
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