The clock is ticking on humanity.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its Doomsday Clock forward for 2025, announcing that it is now set to 89 seconds to midnight –— the closest it’s ever been to apocalypse.
The terrifying news was revealed Tuesday morning in Washington, DC after deliberation by the organization’s Security Board and Board of Sponsors, which includes nine Nobel Laureates.
“Every second of delay increases the probability of global disaster,” chair Daniel Holtz declared. Last year, the clock was set at 90 seconds to midnight.
For 2025, multiple global threats were considered when deciding the clock’s time, including the proliferation of nuclear weapons, disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Hamas war, the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, bio-threats, and the continued climate crisis.
Created in 1947, the Doomsday Clock is a metaphor for how close humanity is to destroying itself, functioning as a call-to-action to find ways to resolve “the world’s most urgent, man-made existential threats” and move the hands further away from midnight.
When deciding the time, the board members are asked two questions: Is humanity safer or at greater risk this year compared to last year? And, is humanity safer or at greater risk compared to the more than 75 years the clock has been set?
The clock was created using the imagery of the apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero). Midnight is the time that represents Doomsday.
Factors such as nuclear risk, climate change, disruptive technologies and biosecurity are taken into account when determining the clock’s setting.
Before 2023, the closest the clock was set to midnight was 100 seconds to midnight in 2020, the Bulletin said.
Last year, the board cited a variety of global threats for the clock’s setting, including the Russia-Ukraine war, climate change and the dramatic advance of generative AI.
