Wondering how close the world is to total annihilation, existential doom, and the collapse of life as we know it? Scientists have a new estimate for you.<\/p>\n
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has been faithfully updating its signature \u201cDoomsday Clock<\/a>\u201d since 1947. Every few years (or lately, every year), a group of scientists and security experts gets together to determine how close humanity is to \u201ccivilization-ending apocalypse.\u201d They then set the \u201ctime\u201d on the clock, as a way of letting the world know: The end, or \u201cmidnight,\u201d is near.<\/p>\n This year, the Doomsday Clock is set to 100 seconds to midnight, tying last year as the most baleful warning the group has ever given. \u201cAs close to midnight as ever,\u201d Rachel Bronson, president of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, said in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n To be clear, the clock is not a literal clock. Instead, it\u2019s a sort of a New York Times election needle<\/a> for the planet, an anxiety-inducing egg timer that counts down the \u201cminutes to midnight.\u201d It has ticked back and forth from 17 minutes (phew) to less than 2 minutes (eek!) over the past several decades. The numbers don\u2019t matter as much as what they are supposed to convey \u2014 that, with our nuclear weapons and carbon dioxide emissions and global pandemics and our increasingly dumb internet full of misinformation<\/a>, the world is perilously close to catastrophe. (Climate change is a big reason why the group has moved the clock up<\/a> in recent years.)<\/p>\n The problem is that there are a lot of these apocalyptic countdowns, and after a while, they all start to feel like background noise. The world was going to end in 2012, based on a popular misreading<\/a> of the Mayan calendar \u2014 and then it didn\u2019t. The year 2000 was going to cause large-scale electricity blackouts and computer failures in a Y2K apocalypse \u2014 and then it didn\u2019t, thanks to the hard work of many computer programmers behind the scenes<\/a>.<\/p>\n Climate activists have their own set of deadlines and apocalyptic predictions. In 2018, after the release of a landmark United Nations report on the overheating planet, Greta Thunberg began saying that humanity only had \u201c12 years<\/a>\u201d to halt the destruction of global warming. There\u2019s even a giant digital clock in Union Square<\/a> counting down the hours, minutes, and seconds until we have to totally stop burning fossil fuels \u2014 or face the consequences.<\/p>\n The intentions here are good: Deadlines can motivate people to get things done quickly, as every college student (and journalist) knows. If you hear the world is ending in a little over a decade, you might be motivated to protest in the streets<\/a> against human extinction<\/a>, or skip school to stage a sit-in<\/a>. But dangling the apocalypse in front of the public over and over comes with a downside. Research shows<\/a> that most people can only handle so much fear, devastation, and \u201cthe world is ending!\u201d messaging before they tune out. And then there\u2019s the problem of what happens when the allegedly catastrophic moment actually arrives. When 2030 (the most popular \u201cclimate deadline<\/a>\u201d) rolls around, my guess is that we\u2019ll still be spewing some carbon dioxide into the atmosphere \u2014 and, hopefully, human civilization will still be standing. At that point, will all of those \u201c12 year\u201d warnings feel like crying wolf?<\/p>\n The Doomsday Clock has a similar problem. As Lawrence Krauss, a former member of the Bulletin\u2019s board of sponsors, wrote in the Wall Street Journal<\/a> last year, it\u2019s hard to take the clock seriously when it has remained frighteningly close to the apocalypse for \u2026 over 70 years. (Humanity\u2019s best showing was in 1991, when the bulletin announced that the Cold War was over and set the clock a relaxing 17 minutes<\/a> to midnight.) As we\u2019ve learned during the pandemic, people have trouble focusing on catastrophes for more than even a few weeks at a time<\/a>; asking them to fixate on the potential demise of civilization for decades is a tall order.<\/p>\n One of the weirdest things about the Doomsday Clock in 2021 is that, after a year in which most people felt closer to the apocalypse than ever before \u2014 remember the Blade Runner<\/em>-esque orange skies over San Francisco, the rioters storming the U.S. Capitol building, and the deadly virus decimating the world? \u2014 the clock didn\u2019t budge a single second. (The Bulletin explained its decision in a statement<\/a>, noting that \u201cCOVID-19 will not obliterate civilization.\u201d Comforting.)<\/p>\n Since the invention of nuclear weapons \u2014 and, in a way, ever since people started digging up and burning fossil fuels for energy \u2014 humanity has been living under a knife edge. Our way of life could be upended by an asteroid strike, by trigger-happy heads of state with nuclear arsenals, or devastating climate \u201ctipping points<\/a>\u201d that jolt the weather into a new, strange normal. But we don\u2019t need a clock to tell us that: It\u2019s simply a part of being human in an overheating, interconnected world. All the clock does is make us feel anxious, then disappointed, then anxious again, and finally \u2014 if you\u2019re like me \u2014 a little bit bored.<\/p>\n This story was originally published by Grist<\/a> with the headline The Doomsday Clock has been ticking for 70 years. It\u2019s time to let it die.<\/a> on Jan 30, 2021.<\/p>\n