Meet me at 100 seconds to midnight

Besides being a great guess for a Taylor Swift lyric, this story’s headline is also the current setting of the Doomsday Clock, which measures humanity’s current threat of self-annihilation. And at 10 am ET this morning, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will announce its annual update to this end-of-the-world measuring timepiece.

☝️ First things first: The Doomsday Clock isn’t an actual clock, but rather a symbol created in 1947 by the Albert Einstein-founded Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The hands serve as a metaphor for “how close we are to destroying our world,” with this theoretical doomsday occurring when the clock reaches midnight.

When it was first created, the Doomsday Clock was intended as a direct analogy for the threat of nuclear war, with considerable overlap between the Bulletin’s founding members and those who worked on the Manhattan Project (including Bulletin Chairman J. Robert Oppenheimer).

But over time, the Bulletin’s focus expanded like your brain after reading this newsletter to encompass a wider range of issues, including biological threats, societally disruptive technologies, and climate change (added in 2007).

• The clock's original setting in 1947 was seven minutes to midnight. Since then it’s been set forward 16 times, and backward eight times.
• The furthest from midnight it’s ever been was 17 minutes in 1991 – after the US and Soviet Union signed a nuclear arms reduction treaty – and the nearest is 100 seconds from 2020 to the present – because Covid.

📝 Bottom line: Some experts have pushed back against the widespread popularization of the Doomsday Clock, casting doubt on its usefulness as a measurement of “actual risk” and calling it mostly fear mongering. And since the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists doesn’t have any ability to set global policy, many experts say it’s best to use the Doomsday Clock as a way of stimulating discussion, rather than a strict indication of how much time humanity has left.