Once Again, the Doomsday Clock Creeps Dangerously Close to Midnight

Earth is approaching total annihilation.

• The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has updated its Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight—the same time the group set it to last year.
• The Doomsday Clock isn't updated on a set time frame, but rather, as events dictate. You can thank the pandemic, climate change, and the threat of nuclear war for this update.
• Former Manhattan Project scientists created the Doomsday Clock in 1947.

Life as we know it is on the brink of disaster, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit organization made up of scientists and global security experts. On Wednesday morning, the group published a new statement deriding the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic and expressing concern about nuclear weapons and climate change.

That's why the organization is keeping its figurative Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight—a designation that it previously made back in 2020 for similar reasons. The setting is the closest we've come to a symbolic apocalypse since the first tests of the hydrogen bomb in 1953.

Interested in reading more? Find the complete article written by David Grossman and Courtney Linder here.