If you are living in the United States, it’s not all in your head that it sometimes feels like the world is ending. Between violent ICE raids, threats of an impending World War III, and a faltering economy, the weight of daily life is beyond overwhelming right now. It feels like a charge in the air, a buzz that is quietly nagging at your eardrums and waiting to go off in an unavoidable detonation.
And honestly, scientists aren’t doing much to refute it. The minds behind the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic clock started two years after nuclear weapons were developed by Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and University of Chicago scientists, say we are now only 85 seconds away from midnight. When midnight is reached on the Doomsday clock, according CNN, humans will have made the earth uninhabitable.
“A year ago, we warned that the world was perilously close to global disaster and that any delay in reversing course increased the probability of catastrophe,” stated the current managers of the clock, the minds behind the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “Rather than heed this warning, Russia, China, the United States, and other major countries have instead become increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic. Hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war, climate change, the misuse of biotechnology, the potential threat of artificial intelligence, and other apocalyptic dangers.”
It is the official closest we have ever been to midnight, reported LAD Bible.
When you look at the history of the timeline that began in 1947, however, it gives me a small glimmer of hope: The clock can be set back further:
- 1947 – Created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; set at 7 minutes to midnight.
- 1949 – Moved closer after the Soviet Union tests its first atomic bomb.
- 1953 – Set to 2 minutes to midnight after the US and USSR test hydrogen bombs.
- 1963 – Turned back to 12 minutes following the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
- 1991 – Farthest we’ve been from catastrophe: 17 minutes to midnight after the Cold War ends.
- 2002 – Moved to 7 minutes to midnight, driven by concerns over nuclear materials and terrorism.
- 2007 – Moved to 5 minutes to midnight, highlighting climate change as a major threat equal to nuclear weapons.
- 2010 – The clock was moved back to 6 minutes to midnight, reflecting hope for renewed climate negotiations and international cooperation.
- 2018 – Set to 2 minutes to midnight (first time since 1953), 30 seconds closer from 2017, due to rising nuclear risks and ineffective climate change policies.
- 2020 – Moved to 100 seconds to midnight, the closest ever at the time, after the pandemic broke out.
- 2023–2025 – Set to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been.
But setting it back is going to take a lot of cooperation from countries around the world.
“Humanity has not made sufficient progress on the existential risks that endanger us all,” CNN reported bulletin President and CEO Alexandra Bell said of the reasoning for this drastic change. “The Doomsday Clock is a tool for communicating how close we are to destroying the world with technologies of our own making. The risks we face from nuclear weapons, climate change and disruptive technologies are all growing. Every second counts and we are running out of time.”
It’s hard to wrap my head around as I stand at the kitchen counter, slathering mustard onto my son’s ham sandwich for school, laying out my day’s work plans and wondering how I am going to get him to baseball practice on time. The smaller world I live in doesn’t stop because the world at large is in chaos, and that reality is hard to grapple with. All I — and really we — can do is resist where I can, strengthen my community, and pray the insatiable greed and lust for power of our world leaders somehow get knocked down.
