As the nuclear era began, scientists conceptualized the Doomsday Clock to symbolize how close humanity teeters to global annihilation.

Fast forward nearly eighty years, and on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST), this symbolic clock was adjusted to 85 seconds before midnight, marking the closest proximity to doomsday ever recorded, as reported by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the organization that inaugurated the clock back in 1947.

Midnight on this metaphorical clock signifies the point at which human actions render Earth uninhabitable.

In addition to nuclear threats, Bulletin experts highlighted the pervasive spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories as significant existential risks to mankind.

“Humanity has not made adequate strides in addressing the existential risks that threaten our collective future,” stated Alexandra Bell, the Bulletin’s president and CEO.

“The Doomsday Clock is a tool for communicating how close we are to destroying the world with technologies of our own making. The risks we face from nuclear weapons, climate change and disruptive technologies are all growing. Every second counts and we are running out of time.

“It is a hard truth, but this is our reality.”

Last year, Bulletin scientists warned that countries needed to change course towards international co-operation and action on the most critical existential risks, said Dr Daniel Holz, chair of the Bulletin‘s science and security board.

“Rather than heed this warning, major countries became even more aggressive, adversarial and nationalistic,” added Holz, also a professor in the department of physics, astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago.

Additionally, “grave dangers persist in the life sciences, particularly in emerging areas such as the development of synthetic mirror life, despite repeated warnings from scientists worldwide,” Holz added.

“The international community has no co-ordinated plan, and the world remains unprepared for potentially devastating biological threats.”

What is the Doomsday Clock?

A group of scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, the code name for the development of the atomic bomb during World War II, established the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as a non-profit in 1945.

The organisation’s original purpose was to measure nuclear threats, but in 2007, the Bulletin decided to also include the climate crisis in its calculations.

Annually over the past 79 years, Bulletin scientists have changed the clock’s time according to how close they believe the human race is to total annihilation. Some years the time changes, and some years it doesn’t.

The time is set by experts on the Bulletin‘s science and security board in consultation with its board of sponsors — which was formed by Albert Einstein in December 1948, with J Robert Oppenheimer as its first chair. The board currently includes eight Nobel laureates, many of them in physics or chemistry.

Is the Doomsday Clock real?

The clock isn’t designed to definitively measure existential threats but rather to spark conversations about difficult scientific topics and crises the planet is facing, according to the Bulletin. Some experts who haven’t been involved in the clock’s designation have questioned its usefulness.

“It’s an imperfect metaphor,” Dr Michael Mann, presidential distinguished professor in the department of Earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania, told CNN in 2022, highlighting that the clock’s framing combines various types of risk that have different characteristics and occur in different timescales.

Still, he added that it “remains an important rhetorical device that reminds us, year after year, of the tenuousness of our current existence on this planet.”

The Bulletin has made thoughtful decisions each year on how to get people’s attention about existential threats and the required action, Eryn MacDonald, senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program, told CNN in 2022.

“While I wish we could go back to talking about minutes to midnight instead of seconds, unfortunately that no longer reflects reality.”

At the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2021, then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson cited the Doomsday Clock when talking about the climate crisis the world is facing.

What happens when the clock hits midnight?

The Doomsday Clock has never reached midnight, and former Bulletin president and chief executive Rachel Bronson, who now serves as a senior adviser, said she hoped it never would.

“When the clock is at midnight, that means there’s been some sort of nuclear exchange or catastrophic climate change that’s wiped out humanity,” she said. “We never really want to get there, and we won’t know it when we do.”

What can we do to turn back time on the clock?

Moving the Doomsday Clock back with bold, substantial actions is still possible. In fact, the hand moved its farthest away from midnight — 17 minutes to the hour — in 1991, when then-president George HW Bush’s administration signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviet Union.

“We at the Bulletin believe that because humans created these threats, we can reduce them,” Bronson said. “But doing so is not easy, nor has it ever been. And it requires serious work and global engagement at all levels of society.”

Regarding what individuals can do, don’t underestimate the power of discussing these important issues with your peers, Bulletin scientists said. Sparking conversations can help combat misinformation, and public engagement can urge leaders to act.

“Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust,” Maria Ressa, cofounder and CEO of Rappler, a Filipino news outlet, said in the Bulletin news briefing. “Without these three, we have no shared reality. We can’t have journalism. We can’t have democracy. The radical collaboration this moment demands becomes impossible. Think of shared facts as the operating system of collective action.”

Other personal actions can also make a difference. To potentially help mitigate the climate crisis, for one, consider whether there are small changes you can make in your daily life, such as how often you walk versus drive and how you heat your home.

Eating seasonally and locally, reducing food waste, conserving water, reducing plastic use and recycling properly are other ways to help mitigate, or deal with the effects of, the climate crisis.

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