89 Seconds to the End of the World

How the doomsday clock is predicting the apocalypse

89 seconds. Only 89 seconds to the end of the world; that is what the Doomsday Clock is telling us. On 28 January, scientists from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists shook the world with an ominous announcement: the hands of the Doomsday Clock — the clock created to tell us how close we are to the end of the world — have moved closer to midnight. Never in history has mankind’s annihilation been so imminent. 

Is it the end of the world, then? Luckily, no, or at least, definitely not in just a minute and a half. But then what is this baleful time-teller saying? Its concept traces back to an international group of researchers known as the Chicago Atomic Scientists, who, after witnessing the destruction that the atomic bombs caused during World War II, decided to form the Bulletin to inform and warn people about the risk of nuclear warfare and a possible global catastrophe.

The group was composed of some of the greatest minds of the time, such as Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Scottish Nobel-laureate John Boyd Orr, and many members of the Manhattan Project. In 1947, these “scientific men” — as members of the Bulletin described themselves — came up with a physical metaphor to represent the likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe: the Doomsday Clock. Bulletin co-founder and Russian-born American biophysicist Eugene Rabinowitch described the Clock as depicting “basic changes in the level of continuous danger in which mankind lives in the nuclear age.”

Its countdown towards natural destruction calls for an urgent intervention in order to be stopped. Initially, midnight symbolised nuclear extinction, but, with time, other factors, like the accelerating aggravation of climate change, the rapid development of artificial intelligence, and bioterrorism, have also been included in the doomy judgement. With this in mind, every January, members of the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board gather to discuss the technological dangers of the modern era, accordingly shifting the clock’s hands further or nearer to the end.

The clock was originally set at seven minutes to midnight, and during its 78-year history, it has been moved backwards eight times and forward eighteen times. It first dropped during the Cold War and the following arms race, then rose after the fall of the Berlin Wall, peaking at a record seventeen minutes in 1991 with the reduction treaty on nuclear weapons signed by US President George H. W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Worryingly, the clock has been running fast over the past decade. North Korea’s nuclear tests, terrorist attacks, and the Covid-19 pandemic have all been alarming events that have led scientists to shift the clock further forward — and this trend does not look like it is coming to an end anytime soon.

Indeed, this year saw a historical negative record of just 89 seconds to midnight. Bulletin scientists, together with the President of the Royal Society and the nine Nobel laureates that form the Board of Sponsors, have based their decision on the perpetuation of conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, the second withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change, and the spread of misinformation at the hands of increasingly more realistic artificial intelligence.

“In setting the Clock one second closer to midnight, we send a stark signal,” wrote the Bulletin’s editor John Mecklin. Their goal is clear: to make fellow scientists aware of the relationship between their work and world politics and to spur global leaders to enter "good-faith discussions about the global threats outlined” and “take that first step without delay.”

With only 89 seconds left on the Doomsday Clock, it’s unclear whether this plea will again fall on deaf ears, or if this time it will finally be the spark for a brighter future.

Image by Wikipedia Commons