The Doomsday Clock is ticking to the final seconds before midnight strikes.

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The imaginary clock's hands indicate that we are on the verge of extinction.

For the second year in a row, the hands of the Doomsday Clock are hovering at 100 seconds to midnight, the hour of humanity's demise. Doomsday has never been closer.

According to Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists timekeepers, it is not too late to reverse the clock and make the world a safer place for all people (BAS). At a virtual news conference on Thursday (Jan. 20), representatives of the non-profit announced the clock's new time, which you can watch here on Live Science.

According to BAS president and CEO Rachel Bronson, there were "many bright spots and numerous troubling tendencies" in the past year, including the frightening rise of online misinformation that delayed work in controlling the COV pandemic and strategies to combat climate change.

Live Science earlier revealed that the BAS adjusted the clock's hands to 100 seconds before midnight in 2020, the closest it's ever come to Armageddon in its 75-year history.

When the BAS published a graphic of a clock showing seven seconds to midnight on the cover of a magazine in 1947, it aimed to bring attention to the unprecedented danger of nuclear weapons. Many nuclear weapons were built and kept during the following Cold War. The first hydrogen bombs were detonated in 1953, and the clock's time leaped from 2 minutes to midnight. The Arms Control Association estimated in 2021 that Russia had over 6,000 nuclear weapons, the United States had over 5,500, and the United Kingdom, China, France, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea each had hundreds more.

Science and policy specialists at BASF determine every year whether or not humanity is getting closer or further away from the apocalypse. According to a BAS statement, we are still on "the doorstep of disaster" despite modest success in the fight against global threats in 2021. Climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic pose grave concerns, and communities and leaders have responded inconsistently, according to BAS representatives at the press event. This, they added, has hampered their efforts to handle both of these critical challenges.

According to BAS presenter, science communicator, and author Hank Green, "we've proved in the last two years that enormous difficulties don't necessarily bring us together."

What time is it now?

"Is humanity safer or at greater risk, this year compared to last year, and is humanity safer or at greater risk this year compared to the 75 years we've been asking the question, with a focus on man-made threats, nuclear risk, climate change, and new disruptive technologies," Bronson said, referring to the BAS's annual Doomsday Clock setting.

According to BAS Science and Security Board member and Stanford University political science professor Scott Sagan, some positive developments in nuclear weapons management occurred in the past year, with the United States and Russia resuming diplomatic dialogues about arsenal caps and maintaining nuclear stability.

"The world faces multiple arms races without arms control," Sagan said at the briefing. Despite this, relations between the two countries remain tense. China and Russia are testing new antisatellite weapons, North Korea is producing new nuclear material, and short-range missiles for atomic weapons are being developed in India and Pakistan.

BAS board member Asha George, executive director of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, said at the briefing that the Doomsday Clock's time reflects the continued spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Approximately 5 million people worldwide, and an estimated 30 million deaths have gone unreported. One of the reasons why the disease is still spreading and evolving is because many global leaders have failed to quickly and reliably enforce measures like vaccination and mask use, which would have significantly slowed disease transmission, said BAS board member Suzet McKinney of Sterling Bay in Chicago, principal and director of Life Sciences.

McKinney said that there had been "hundreds of millions of cases and millions of fatalities" because of governments' reluctance to respond to the pandemic. I believe the current administration is trying to change the tide in the US, but the harm done in our early response has been tough. Disinformation about COVID aided the disease's spread by persuading individuals to reject scientifically proven means of limiting transmission and weakening the authority of health officials to enforce mask use and social withdrawal.

In 2021, record-breaking heat waves, floods, and wildfires dominated the news due to climate calamities. To avoid the worst-case scenarios anticipated by climate models, proposals and initiatives to minimize the use of fossil fuels and replace them with sustainable energy infrastructure fall far short, according to the BAS statement.

According to Raymond Pierrehumbert, BAS board member and physics professor at Oxford, "every year that human activities continue to dump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it nearly irreversibly ratchets up the toll of human suffering and ecosystem destruction arising from global climate disruption."

The COVID-19 pandemic and climate change cannot be stopped, but the BAS board believes we can slow down the Doomsday Clock. Climate change and pandemic response will necessitate coordinated global political action and policy reforms, but individual actions still matter, says Green.

Other people will work on other difficulties if you can get curious about one problem and make it somewhat easier to solve or slightly better, Green stated. 'How can we communicate better on the internet,' might be my area of expertise because of this, but it will be different for everyone," he noted. It doesn't mean that the action you do isn't part of fixing everything, just because it doesn't fix everything.

LIVE/science will air a special on the Doomsday Clock on Friday (Jan. 21) at 12 p.m. ET, featuring Hank Green and Suzet McKinney's perspectives. Here on the Live Science website, as well as on YouTube and Facebook, the show will be available to watch.

Reference : https://www.livescience.com/doomsday-clock-update-2022

Image source : https://pixabay.com/id/photos/bumi-api-air-dunia-frigat-2635273/

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