This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
A few seconds from Tuesday.
Depending on who you ask, the world ends in a few different ways. The catechists go in for the fire and brimstone. TS Eliot thought the "bang" was a bit on the nose. And REM starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, aeroplanes and hurricanes, then tears straight into the vitriolic, patriotic, slam fight, bright light, feeling pretty psyched end of the world as we know it (*deep breath in*, I'm fine).
In whatever way we do all go when we go, it won't happen a second too soon. That is, at least, according to the handful of scientists who have been counting down to the big ka-boom for more than seven decades.
On Tuesday, the world will learn how close the impending cataclysm is (down to a matter of seconds) as the scientists who monitor such things comes together to reset the Doomsday Clock - a symbolic measurement of the likelihood of the human race causing its own catastrophic extinction in our lifetime.
The clock was reset to 90 seconds to midnight in 2023 - the closest it has ever been to the rapture - representing a "time of unprecedented danger" amid Russia's war in Ukraine and its thinly-veiled threats of igniting a nuclear conflict.
The time had been previously set at 100 seconds to midnight in 2020 - the first time in history that catastrophe was considered a matter of symbolic seconds away, rather than minutes - and it remained there through the height of the COVID pandemic in 2021 and escalating tensions between the US and China in 2022.
This week, the time will be revised again when experts meet to determine what existential threats the planet faces and how likely they are to make it into a revised version of the REM song.
The Doomsday Clock was adopted by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in 1947 at the dawn of the Cold War when artist Martyl Langsdorf, the wife of Manhattan Project physicist Alexander Langsdorf, was commissioned by the magazine's co-editor to design the cover of that year's June edition.
Langsdorf returned with an image of the final quarter segment of a clock face, between 9pm and midnight, with a minute hand set at 11.53pm, which she later said was the time that looked most pleasing to the eye.
The clock has been reset 29 times since then and reviewed annually since 2015. It became an iconic image of the 20th Century, appearing in media and literature that emerged from the global anxiety of the Cold War and the threat of mutually assured destruction, and found new relevance in the 21st Century as the litany of threats to life on the planet diversified.
While the clock was initially focused on destruction by nuclear means, the board of the Bulletin now consider a more comprehensive range of modern species-ending threats like war, bio-threats, pandemics and disease outbreaks, disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence, and climate change when they meet to reset the time.
The Bulletin began as a newsletter in 1945, founded by Manhattan Project physicists including Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Eugene Rabinowitch, to warn the public of the danger of nuclear weapons and give voice to scientists concerned about their proliferation.
The clock was reset for the first time in 1949 when the Soviet Union began testing nuclear weapons, and it has since become a symbolic barometer of general cataclysmic threats to the species.
This week, the Bulletin board will consider modern nuclear proliferation, the climate crisis, Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine and the more recent escalation in Israel and Gaza, and the dangers of AI when they debate how far we are from the end in a live-streamed broadcast hosted by science celebrity Bill Nye.
The clock has fluctuated a few times since 1949 but has been marching incrementally closer to midnight since 2010, when the stewards began moving the hands from 11.54pm, ending a time buoyed by the hope that we were headed "toward a world free of nuclear weapons".
The clock has been set more 15 minutes from midnight only once throughout its history, during considerable optimism in 1991. It was a significant moment, when the time was set at 17 minutes, as Bulletin founding member John Simpson believed that a 15 minute increment to total catastrophe was all anyone would see in their lifetime.
Yet, at the turn of the decade, the Soviet Union ceased to exist and the world seemed to breathe a deep, shoulder-dropping sigh as thousands of tactical weapons and strategic missiles in the West were taken off hair-trigger alert.
In the years that followed, despite efforts in the early 90s to defuse the Middle East powder keg and the threat of nuclear annihilation shifted for a time into ever remoter possibility, the advent of catastrophic climate change, the modernisation of weapons of war, and that one time a Halloween jack-o'-lantern was given the keys to the White House, have all seen the minute hand shift gradually for the worse.
Nevertheless, the stewards of the time say that as much as the clock is a harbinger of doom, it is also a call to action.
"The Clock ticks. Global danger looms. Wise leaders should act immediately," they wrote in 2016.
Then, in 2023: "In this time of unprecedented global danger, concerted action is required, and every second counts."
