By Rachel Bronson and Daniel Holz
We live in a world that is persistently unstable.
The war in Ukraine grinds on, a new one starts in Gaza. The climate crisis is felt in increasingly obvious and deadly ways with floods, fires and other extreme weather. The COVID-19 pandemic persists in the background. Glittering new advances in artificial intelligence worry as much as they intrigue. And rather than rising to face these challenges our politics seem to sink to new lows.
Our organization, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has studied and covered threats to humanity since 1945. It was founded by members of the Manhattan Project, like J. Robert Oppenheimer, who in the wake of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings felt deep responsibility for the consequences of their own work and could foresee new dangers on the horizon.
We use a symbol, the Doomsday Clock, as a metaphor to convey a snapshot of the scientific opinion on the amount of risk humanity faces.
This year we reset the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight – holding at the closest we have ever been to apocalypse. Teetering near the edge.
The decision of how to set the clock is made each year by a collection of leading scientists and experts with backgrounds in nuclear physics, public health, technology, climate science and more. Nine Nobel Prize winners advise on the decision. Even with all that brain power, there is no easy formula to answer how close we are to disaster.
Some years that lack of a clear answer invites debate. But now it feels like our warning fits squarely in the zeitgeist. You do not have to be a Nobel Prize winner to feel that something – many things – are dangerously wrong.
We see this as a moment of acute danger. But as experts who spend our lives on these issues, we also see hope.