The Doomsday Clock Never Closer to Midnight: "Eighty-nine Seconds to the End of the World"

The so-called "Doomsday Clock" has moved 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever come to catastrophe, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced today. "By moving the clock closer to midnight, we are sending a strong signal. Because the world is already dangerously close to the precipice, and any movement toward midnight must be taken as an indication of extreme danger and unmistakable alarm," said Daniel Holz, chairman of the Science and Safety Committee.

"Every second of delay in reversing this trend," he continued, "increases the likelihood of a global disaster. We are now 89 seconds to midnight. This is the closest the world has ever been to midnight."

The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947 by scientists from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago. It is a metaphor that measures the danger of a hypothetical end of the world to which humanity is subjected. Originally, midnight represented only atomic war, while since 2007 it has considered any event that can inflict irrevocable damage on humanity (such as climate change). 

In the year of the clock's debut, when the hands were set at 7 minutes to midnight, the greatest danger came from nuclear weapons and the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, while in 2024 physicists have indicated that the main causes for concern will be the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, climate change and the great acceleration of technologies based on Artificial Intelligence.

 It is far away, however, from the record of 1991, when the end of the Cold War and the signing of the treaty on the reduction of nuclear weapons caused the clock to be moved back a full 17 minutes from midnight. So far, physicists have decided 25 updates of the Doomsday Clock: of these, only 8 times have the hands moved away from midnight.

The last one dates back to 2010, when shortly before the start of the year, during the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen, industrialized and developing countries agreed to take responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions and limit the increase in global temperature, while Russia and the United States planned further reductions in nuclear arsenals. This turned the clock back by 1 minute, from the 5 minutes established in 2007. The clock then jumped forward again in 2012, bringing humanity ever closer to planetary disaster, until reaching 90 seconds set for 2023.