WHEN WILL THE WORLD END TIMER HOW TO
But to understand what that really means, you need to understand the story of the Clock, where it came from, how to read it, and what it tells us about humanity’s existential predicament. And in 2020, the Bulletin's president, Rachel Bronson, solemnly announced that its hands had moved closer to armageddon than ever before – only 100 seconds. Every year, the announcement highlights the complex web of catastrophic risks facing humanity, including weapons of mass destruction, environmental breakdown and disruptive technologies. Today, the scientists responsible for the Doomsday Clock at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will publish their annual judgement of how close its hands sit to midnight, for the 75th time. 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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