Today the time has come: After three years we will find out whether the doomsday clock – the “doomsday clock” – will be closer to twelve o’clock again. It is currently at 100 seconds to midnight, which means we are dangerously close to the “end of time”. Every year a new balance is drawn, but the last time the group of scientists moved the clock was 2020. And that was before the war in Ukraine and the corona pandemic.
75 years ago the doomsday clock created by a group of scientists who predicted how close mankind is to the end of the world. The position of the hands has been dictated in recent years by the threat of nuclear war and the consequences of climate change on our planet. Now the corona pandemic has also added to this. Today is 100 seconds to midnight for humanity, the world has never been so close to catastrophe, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the organization behind the clock. Before 2020, midnight was closest to two minutes.
This afternoon will show how rosy our future looks. We are already fast approaching midnight and it is expected that after today we will be even closer to the “end of time”. But how realistic is the timestamp of this watch? The good news is that predictions are not an exact science. Above all, the scientists hope that the watch will serve as a warning to the world. It serves as a reminder of the dangers that must be dealt with if we are to survive on our planet. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists writes on their website that it is “a design warning the public of how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own development”.
War Ukraine
Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Bulletin kept the clock at 100 seconds to midnight. President Vladimir Putin then threatened to use nuclear weapons if NATO intervened to help Ukraine. This is what 100 seconds to midnight looks like. An end to the war does not appear to be in sight for the time being; so the nuclear dangers are not over yet. The hands will likely move even closer to 12 hours after today.
The clock was furthest from midnight in 1991, shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain. At the time, the hands were at 17 minutes to 12. Former US President George HW Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev both announced reductions in their nuclear arsenals earlier this year.
At 4 p.m. we find out where the hands are.
Source : HLN
