We live in a "time of unprecedented danger", the Bulletin said in the statement released to announce the moving of the clock hands. At 90 seconds to midnight, it is the nearest the world has been to disaster in the 76 years that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has released annual assessments. However, that's not quite accurate.Īfter spending three years set at 100 seconds to midnight, the hands of the Doomsday Clock ticked 10 seconds closer to global catastrophe in 2023. It's a powerful story, and for many years I thought this is what the Doomsday Clock meant: that its hands represented the time we have left before the end. It never crossed my mind that someday I might be working on the same problem, as a researcher at the Centre of the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. Then she contrasted this great swathe of history with how short our futures might be, and told us how a group of scientists in the US thought we may only have a few metaphorical minutes left until midnight. She told my class about the grand sweep of history, explaining that if everything that had happened on our planet was compressed into a single year, then life would have emerged in early March, multi-cellular organisms in November, dinosaurs in late-December – and humans wouldn't arrive on the scene until 23:30 on New Year’s Eve. I first became aware of the Doomsday Clock at school in the mid-1990s when a teacher introduced it to me.
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