After 78 years, the Doomsday Clock has been set closer than it has ever been. As a global society, we are now only 89 seconds to midnight after scientists moved the clock’s hand one second closer to the symbolic end of the world.

Over the more than seven decades since the Doomsday Clock’s creation, the world has survived economic downturns, the assassinations of presidents and other leaders, nuclear plant meltdowns, a cold war, a global pandemic and hundreds of natural disasters.

On Tuesday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said that the two-year 90-second standard is no more and that we’re less than a minute and a half away from global destruction.

When making the determination, they ask two questions — is humanity safer or at greater risk than last year, and is humanity safer or at greater risk than when the clock was created — USA Today reported.

“In 2024, humanity edged ever closer to catastrophe. Trends that have deeply concerned the Science and Security Board continued, and despite unmistakable signs of danger, national leaders and their societies have failed to do what is needed to change course,” the group said.

“In setting the Clock one second closer to midnight, we send a stark signal: Because the world is already perilously close to the precipice, a move of even a single second should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster,” it added, citing the war in Ukraine, conflict in the Middle East, the impact of climate change and emerging and re-emerging diseases.

The group pointed to the advances in artificial intelligence being used in military targeting in both Ukraine and the Middle East while more countries move to adopt AI into military usage.

“Such efforts raise questions about the extent to which machines will be allowed to make military decisions—even decisions that could kill on a vast scale, including those related to the use of nuclear weapons,” the group said.

“We are in a situation where a slew of risks of arms racing, of loss of guard rails, the possibility of further proliferation, possibility of nuclear use, are all rising at the same time,” Manpreet Sethi, a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said, according to USA Today.

“I fear we might be sleepwalking into nuclear disaster,” Sethi said.

The group then said that all of the challenges to survival “are greatly exacerbated by a potent threat multiplier: the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that degrade the communication ecosystem and increasingly blur the line between truth and falsehood.”

Not all agree with the accuracy of the Doomsday Clock.

“It’s an imperfect metaphor,” University of Pennsylvania Presidential Distinguished Professor Michael Mann told CNN in 2022. He said that the risks have different characteristics and some move faster or slower than others, but went on to say, that the clock “remains an important rhetorical device that reminds us, year after year, of the tenuousness of our current existence on this planet.”

Some years it stays static, while others will see the hand tick forward or backward on the metaphorical clock, ABC News reported.

It has been furthest from midnight - at 17 minutes - in 1991 after the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty was brought back. and there was a reduction in nuclear weapons for both the U.S. and Russia, according to ABC News.

What would happen if the clock struck midnight?

Bulletin president and CEO Rachel Bronson told CNN, “When the clock is at midnight, that means there’s been some sort of nuclear exchange or catastrophic climate change that’s wiped out humanity. We never really want to get there, and we won’t know it when we do.”

Read the entire statement from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists here or below.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was created in 1945 by Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer and the University of Chicago scientists who developed the Manhattan Project, the organization said. Two years later, it created the Doomsday Clock setting midnight as the stand-in for a proverbial apocalypse and the threat to humanity.

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