The end of the world is coming... eventually. But for more than half a century now, a global team of scientists have been getting together to try and tell us all just how close we are to the end. Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has maintained a measure of humanity's proximity to the brink called the Doomsday Clock, which is absolutely not as cool as it sounds when you first hear about it. Is it even a real clock? (No.) Can it predict the apocalypse? (It can't.) Does it have any use at all? (Actually... well, watch the video.) From its symbolic origins to its current status measuring many metrics of humanity, this is the scary history of the Doomsday Clock.
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00:00It's two minutes to midnight. Sound ominous? Those words might make you shiver,
00:04even if you've never heard of the Doomsday Clock. What do we really know about the symbolic clock
00:09and the end of the world? The Doomsday Clock was the brainchild of a group of scientists who had
00:14worked on the Manhattan Project, the effort to develop a functioning atomic weapon during World
00:18War II. In 1947, the scientists began publishing a bulletin updating the public about nuclear
00:24weapons, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. They commissioned landscape painter Martil
00:28Langsdorff, who was married to one of the founders of the Bulletin, to create the cover
00:32art for the first edition.
00:33He gave no instructions. All he said is, it can't cost much.
00:37Initially, Langsdorff wanted to design the cover around the symbol for uranium,
00:41but instead she landed on the clock. Congressman Bill Foster later said in a speech honoring
00:46Langsdorff that her clock design, quote,
00:48"...remains a singular reminder of the risks that we face from nuclear weapons in the effects of
00:53climate change." Foster said that despite the clock's original narrow focus, the hands of
00:57the clock are now used to signal humanity's ability to meet the challenges brought not by
01:02just nuclear weapons, but also by climate change. Langsdorff died in 2013 at the age of 96.
01:09The first Doomsday Clock was set to seven minutes to midnight. The choice to set it to seven minutes
01:14was arbitrary. Martil Langsdorff said she chose seven minutes to midnight because of how it looked
01:18on the cover. At some point, scientists at the Bulletin decided the clock would be even more
01:22terrifying if the hand appeared to be moving closer to midnight. So in 1949, the magazine's
01:27editor Eugene Rabinowitz moved the hand forward a full four minutes, turning seven minutes into
01:32just three. But they actually did have a fairly good reason to be concerned. In 1949, the Soviet
01:38Union tested its first atomic bomb, starting a global arms race. It was at that time that
01:44the scientists decided to use the clock to help inform the public about the state of global
01:48security. The Bulletin apparently likes to keep us guessing by moving the clock's hand back and
01:52forth. The number of minutes we all have left to live has been changed over 20 times since 1947.
01:59In 2020, the clock came closer than ever to the end, with a time marking 100 seconds to midnight.
02:04The Bulletin editor John Mechlin noted that nuclear war and climate change were two major
02:09threats to human civilization, compounded by the presence of cyber warfare. Ford president Rachel
02:14Bronson added,
02:15As far as the Bulletin and the Doomsday Clock are concerned, the world has entered into the
02:19realm of the two-minute warning, a period when danger is high and the margin for error is low.
02:25At this point, you might be wondering why you should pay attention to the Doomsday Clock.
02:29It sounds like just a bunch of propaganda by a few unknown scientists who seem to value their
02:34own opinions pretty highly. But there is some reason to listen to these people. Among these
02:39unknown scientists are 15 Nobel laureates, and Nobel prizes aren't exactly the easiest
02:44thing to come by. Odds are they at least kind of know what they're talking about.
02:48According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Science and Security Board
02:52is the main body responsible for the position of the Doomsday Clock's hands.
02:56The people on this board possess deep knowledge of nuclear and climate sciences, and they also
03:01tend to be the people who give scientific and technological advice to other nations
03:05and international agencies. So not only are they very smart people, they're very smart people with
03:11power and influence, which makes them pretty hard to ignore. And they clearly believe in
03:16the righteousness of what they're doing. If the end of the world does come, you know at least one
03:20of them will be crawling through the ashes of Armageddon to set the clock to midnight.
03:25In 1991, the Science and Security Board figured it was 17 minutes to midnight until the apocalypse.
03:31That's the farthest the clock has ever been from midnight, which really doesn't seem very
03:35far at all. If you think of Doomsday as midnight on New Year's Eve, then 17 minutes before midnight
03:41is when you're going to get your champagne out of the fridge. In other words, the Science and
03:45Security Board wasn't really making anyone more comfortable by moving the hand back so far.
03:49But why was the clock so far from midnight to 1991? Well, for one thing, that year marked the
03:55end of the Cold War and the beginning of non-hostile cooperation between America and the Soviet Union.
04:00For a few minutes, it even looked like maybe both countries would be reducing their nuclear
04:05arsenals. By the end of the year, the Soviet Union had dissolved, bringing an end to a prolonged
04:10and tense period in world history. In 1953, biophysicist Eugene Rabinowitsch wrote an
04:16article for the Bulletin, which began,
04:17"...the hands of the clock of doom have moved again. Only a few more swings of the pendulum,
04:22and from Moscow to Chicago, atomic explosions will strike midnight for Western civilization."
04:27What prompted Rabinowitsch's Shakespearean musings about pendulums and near-certain annihilation?
04:32It was the dual pursuit of even bigger bombs by the United States and the Soviet Union.
04:37The prior year, the U.S. decided nuclear wasn't good enough, transitioning to full hydrogen.
04:42In an effective demonstration of the power of these devices,
04:45the military blew up an entire islet in the Pacific Ocean with a thermonuclear device.
04:50Nine months later, the Soviet Union tested a hydrogen bomb of its own.
04:54In retrospect, the world was probably like 15 seconds to midnight during the Cuban Missile
04:58Crisis, but the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists didn't tell anyone that at the time.
05:02In 1962, when the crisis was unfolding, the clock was still set to seven minutes to midnight,
05:08having not been moved since 1960. It's not like the clock moves immediately.
05:13In January 2017, Lawrence Krauss, the former chairman of the board of the Bulletin of the
05:17Atomic Scientists, told NPR that the board doesn't put a lot of weight onto individual events,
05:23preferring instead to base decisions on global trends and the broad political climate.
05:28Also, no one really knew what was happening during the Cuban Missile Crisis until it was over.
05:32With that in mind, the Bulletin decided not to freak everyone out by changing the clock,
05:36based on an event that was already in the past.
05:39Up until 2007, the only thing the Doomsday Clock and its co-conspirators measured was
05:44the threat of nuclear war, because for most of that time, nuclear war was the only disaster
05:48people could really imagine that might actually destroy the planet. Then came climate change.
05:55Right now, we are looking at imminent landfall of this storm.
06:00That year, when the Bulletin moved the hands forward from seven minutes to midnight to five
06:04minutes to midnight, they cited the rise of a second nuclear age, and for the first time,
06:09climate change. They wrote,
06:10"...damage to ecosystems is already taking place. Flooding, destructive storms,
06:15increased drought, and polar ice melt are causing loss of life and property."
06:19The really annoying thing about the Doomsday Clock is its design. Most of the time,
06:24it's just depicted as the upper left quarter of a clock, which implies that the timeline
06:29will always be pretty much within the last 15 minutes of life on Earth. Besides being a not
06:34very optimistic look into the future, the clock's design has some fundamental problems, most
06:39notably the absence of a point of reference that people can use to actually gauge how dire two
06:44minutes, five minutes, or ten minutes actually is. Where, for example, would the clock have been
06:48during Paleolithic times? 11 p.m.? 7 a.m.? And what does that say about the fate of the Neanderthals,
06:56who went through their own doomsday on the way to going extinct? Did they get their own clock?
07:01Basically, the answer is, don't think about it too hard. According to Wired, Eugene Rabinowitz
07:06explained it like this,
07:07"...the clock is intended to reflect basic changes in the level of continuous danger
07:11in which mankind lives in the nuclear age."
07:14In January 2018, the board moved the hands back to two minutes to midnight.
07:19What compelled the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move us all the way back to
07:23Cold War levels of potential Armageddon? The board said it was, quote,
07:26"...the failure of President Trump and other world leaders to deal with looming threats
07:30of nuclear war and climate change."
07:32In 2020, a statement from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists read,
07:36"...humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers,
07:40nuclear war and climate change, that are compounded by a threat multiplier,
07:44cyber-enabled information warfare that undercuts society's ability to respond.
07:49The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist,
07:53but because world leaders have allowed the international political
07:56infrastructure for managing them to erode."
07:59But that's not all. The board's list of reasons for putting us on the verge of total destruction
08:03also includes North Korea's missile program, a frosty relationship between the U.S. and Russia,
08:09Iran's nuclear ambitions, loss of public trust in the media and other institutions,
08:14disinformation on the internet, and even artificial intelligence.
08:18Still, the Bulletin's chief executive, Rachel Bronson, said nuclear affairs were the biggest
08:22issue the world was facing, stating,
08:24"...to call the world's nuclear situation dire is to understate the danger in its immediacy."
08:30Not everyone thinks the doomsday clock was a good idea. Over the years,
08:34critics have made arguments ranging from the idea that scaring people isn't very productive,
08:38to the possibility that the data the clock is based on is all wrong.
08:42In 2015, researcher Dr. Anders Sandberg wrote for The Conversation that there's
08:47really no way to truly estimate the probability of global annihilation,
08:51because there are too many subjective factors. In other words,
08:54you can't make accurate predictions based on broad assumptions.
08:58The doomsday clock scares us because it was designed to. According to The Breakthrough,
09:02the scientists who gifted us the clock did it because they wanted to convince us
09:06that the threat of global annihilation was real enough to demand our attention.
09:10Sort of the scientist's equivalent of standing around on street corners with a sandwich board.
09:15The world is coming to an end.
09:17But critics of the doomsday clock think that's going too far. Some say the focus on apocalyptic
09:22scenarios distracts us from smaller risks that could eventually add up to the big bad.
09:27Other critics think predicting the end of the world really does nothing but paralyze everyone
09:31into inaction. It's much easier to pop that bottle of champagne and watch the end come
09:36than to try and find a solution. Now, if you think that the apocalypse is imminent,
09:41and literally minutes away, don't panic. Here's some reassurance. The clock can be turned back
09:46again, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was kind enough to tell us how.
09:50In their 2020 statement, they urged U.S. and Russian leaders to essentially be nice to each
09:55other and work together. They asked that countries recommit to the goals of the Paris Climate
09:59Agreement and for citizens to further demand that their governments take major action on climate
10:04change. Furthermore, governments all over the world can commit to policies aimed at
10:08preventing cyber-warfare that undermines and threatens democracy. Editor John Mechlin wrote,
10:13We believe that mass civic engagement will be necessary to compel the change the world needs.
10:18So do your part as a concerned citizen, but maybe still make sure you also have
10:22some champagne stashed away in that bunker. You're gonna need it. Check back next week for more.