Doomsday Clock remains at 100 seconds to midnight amid climate change, cybersecurity and pandemic

The Doomsday Clock remains at 100 seconds to midnight.

The new time on the clock — a metaphorical representation of how close humanity is to destruction — was revealed Thursday morning by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

"Today, the members of the science and security board [SASB] find the world to be no safer than it was last year at this time, and therefore have decided to set the Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight," Rachel Bronson, president and CEO, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said at a press conference via Zoom.

"The Doomsday Clock continues to hover dangerously, reminding us how much work is needed to ensure a safer and healthier planet. We must continue to push the hands of the clock away from midnight."

Some of the issues of concern, the scientists noted, were nuclear proliferation, climate change, the pandemic, cybersecurity and the impacts of mis- and disinformation on social media. 

The organization noted the extreme effects of climate change over the past year, including the record-breaking heat in Western Canada and the U.S., as well as the record-breaking temperature in the Siberian Arctic, droughts in eastern Africa and floods in China and Europe.

Typically, the hands of the clock are moved forward or back depending on how vulnerable the world is. Midnight represents a catastrophe.

The clock was introduced in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists after collaborating with artist Martyl Langsdorf to create a design for the cover of the first issue of their magazine. Langsdorf was married to physicist Alexander Langsdorf, who had worked on the Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bombs.

Feeling the sense of urgency from the scientists working on the bomb, she sketched a clock that suggested humanity didn't have much time left to get the destructive weapon under control. 

The furthest the hands have ever been from midnight was at 17 minutes in 1991, at the end of the Cold War. 

We are currently at the closest to midnight in the clock's history. The hands were first moved to 100 seconds to midnight in 2020. Before that, the closest they had ever come was two minutes to midnight, twice: once in 1953, after both the U.S. and the Soviet Union had tested the first nuclear bombs within six months of one another, and in 2018, mainly due to climate change and the nuclear risk.

Author and science communicator Hank Green, who was part of the press conference, said that while the power of the atom certainly poses a threat to humanity, the real power humans have is the way in which we communicate. 

"Atomic energy might seem like the greatest power we have ever harnessed, but it is not. Our greatest power has always been and will always be our words and our ideas and our stories," he said. 

"I think we need to remember that we are at the beginning of a very big shift in how humans communicate. We do not know what we are doing with this colossal new tool [speech] that we have been given — like a monkey with a gun, wondering why this thing makes so much noise, and then [being] surprised when our foot starts bleeding."