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NEW YORK. — Twenty eight years ago, scientists created a unique sort of timepiece — named the Doomsday Clock — as a symbolic attempt to gauge how close humanity is to destroying the world.
On Tuesday, the clock was set at 89 seconds to midnight — the closest the world has ever been to that marker, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which established the clock in 1947.
Midnight represents the moment at which people will have made the Earth uninhabitable.
For the two years prior, the Bulletin set the clock at 90 seconds to midnight mainly due to the military conflict in Russia and Ukraine, the potential of a nuclear arms race, the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza and the climate crisis.
The clock isn’t designed to definitively measure existential threats but rather to spark conversations about difficult scientific topics such as climate change, according to the Bulletin.
The Doomsday Clock is set every year by experts on the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which was first established by Albert Einstein in December 1948, with J. Robert Oppenheimer as its first chair.
“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 such as artificial intelligence,” said 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, in a news briefing yesterday.
“The countries that possess nuclear weapons are increasing the size and role of their arsenals, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons that can destroy civilisation many times over.”
Progress in the development of “disruptive technologies,” such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology and in space has also far outpaced regulation in those areas, Holz added.
“All of these dangers are greatly exacerbated by 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.”
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 organisation was conceived to measure nuclear threats, but in 2007 the Bulletin made the decision to include climate change in its calculations.
Over the last 78 years, the clock’s time has changed according to how close scientists believe the human race is to total destruction. Some years the time changes, and some years it doesn’t.
“It’s an imperfect metaphor,” Michael E. Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor in the earth and environmental science department at the University of Pennsylvania, told CNN in 2022, highlighting that the clock’s framing combines various types of risk that have different characteristics and occur in different timescales.
Still, he added that it “remains an important rhetorical device that reminds us, year after year, of the tenuousness of our current existence on this planet.” — CNN
Mathew Masinge
Online Reporter