As Douglas Adams was fond of writing: don’t panic. This doesn’t literally mean we’ll all be dead in the next minute-and-a-half. As the Bulletin puts it: As far as metaphors go, it’s the ultimate reminder that we’re on the brink of irrevocably destroying our species and its habitat. The fact that we’re now closer than ever to midnight – Doomsday — indicates that time is running out. Basically, as a species, we’ve reached the point of no return, and we can’t afford to make any more mistakes. Read: A beginner’s guide to the AI apocalypse: Misaligned objectives So what’s the real danger? The Bulletin, whose advisory board contains 13 Nobel laureates, says: There’s a lot to unpack there. We’ve been under nuclear threat for a few generations now. The Doomsday Clock was created back in 1947, not too long after the US dropped a pair of atomic bombs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan. But, according to the Bulletin, we’re now closer to the edge of nuclear warfare than we’ve ever been before. Here’s a bit of perspective: In 1953, when the Doomsday Clock hit two minutes two midnight for the first time, the Bulletin said the following in its official statement: The only other times the Doomsday Clock moved as close as two minutes to midnight were in 2018 and 2019. And now, as the US continues to sew global discord and destroy nuclear proliferation treaties, we’re closer than we’ve ever been to seeing the promise of nuclear obliteration made real. Per the Bulletin’s statement: But politicians and world leaders aren’t just failing to protect us from the greatest weapons-based threat our species has ever known, they’re also completely fumbling the larger looming threat: climate crisis. In an open letter to the world’s political leaders, the Bulletin says: The problems of nuclear proliferation and climate crisis form the framework by which our eventual obliteration will arrive, but they’re exacerbated in 2020 by the emergence of mass manipulation via the internet. The open letter continues: The Doomsday Clock isn’t the universe’s official timer, as mentioned before it’s a metaphor. But when viewed over a series of years, it tells us whether we’re headed in the right direction. Credit: The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists We cannot, as a species, afford to allow those responsible for the proliferation of nuclear threats and the continued organized efforts to discredit empirical scientific evidence indicating the clear and present danger of climate crisis to remain in control of the future. For more information check out the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ entire statement here.
