On the “Doomsday Clock” scale for 2022, humanity is only 100 seconds from the apocalypse, as close as last year. It is the closest we have come to the point that scientists consider to be self-annihilation, and that is equated with midnight.
The also known as “Doomsday Clock” is an initiative created by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) in 1947, when World War II had ended and humanity tasted what would be the destruction of the world with the nuclear bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Since then, 17 years ago, the Doomsday Clock tries to raise awareness of scientific issues that could endanger the existence of the human race, such as climate change, the COVID pandemic, or even brewing military conflicts like the one in Russia and Ukraine.
At a press conference, the BAS warned that the world is no safer today than it was last year. “One hundred seconds to midnight reflects the Board’s judgment that we are caught in a dangerous time, one that brings neither stability nor security. The positive developments of 2018 have failed to offset the long-term negative trends,” said Sharon Squassoni, Co-Chair of the Science and Safety Council. of the BAS, and a research professor at the Institute for International Science and Technology Policy at George Washington University.
When installed, the minute hand was originally set at 7 o’clock, and its end point is the 12, the midnight. Since then the furthest he has been from midnight is 17 minutes, at the end of the Cold War. Then in 2018 it was two minutes away and in 2020 was set to 100 seconds, the closest humanity has come to total destruction. And at the same point it stayed at 2020, and there it is at 2022.
“When the clock strikes midnight, it means that some kind of nuclear exchange or catastrophic climate change has occurred that has wiped out humanity ”, said Rachel Bronson, president of the BAS. “So we never want to get there and we won’t know when we do,” he concluded.
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