Doomsday Clock close to midnight

The “Doomsday Clock” which represents the perils to human existence remains at 100 seconds to midnight this year, with advances like COVID-19 vaccines offset by rising misinformation and threats of conflict.

The group of scientists that set the Clock did welcome “last year’s leadership change in the United States” suggesting it had “provided hope that what seemed like a global race toward catastrophe might be halted and even reversed.”

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and the University of Chicago. Two years later, the group created the Doomsday Clock to symbolically tick towards midnight, the point of a hypothetical global catastrophe. Initially its main focus was the prospect of a world-ending nuclear conflagration in the Cold War, but the group has since broadened its scope to include other threats to humanity and the planet, such as climate change.

The Doomsday Clock is set by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 11 Nobel laureates.

According to the Clock, the world has remained equally vulnerable to the threats posed by war, climate change and pandemics for the third year in a row.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists president Rachel Bronson urged world leaders to do a “far better job of countering disinformation, heeding science and cooperating” in order “to avoid an existential catastrophe, one that would dwarf anything it has yet seen.”