Rachel Mack
The Doomsday Clock, an internationally recognized design representing a countdown to the next worldwide catastrophe, is now set to three minutes from midnight. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, midnight represents the possibility of a global cataclysm.
What exactly does this mean? For starters, these dangers do not necessarily always have to involve human impact on climate change. It could include dangerous technologies of our own doing, like nuclear weapons or simple, but deadly, miscalculations of how we measure all of these components.
The Doomsday Clock can turn back in time. In 1953, with only two minutes to spare, we were the closest we had ever been to midnight since its creation in 1947. But in 1953, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union were testing thermonuclear devices. Even if they were strictly tested for scientific purposes, the possibility of improper or radical use puts us at a greater risk to catastrophe. In just one decade, we dropped back ten minutes. The furthest from midnight the clock had ever been was 17 minutes set in 1991 – the year of my birth, but I’m not saying there’s a correlation or anything.
For more information, check out this 90-second synopsis below:
This is interesting to say the least