Summary
The “Doomsday Clock” has been moved to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
The group cited threats including climate change, nuclear proliferation, the war in Ukraine, pandemics, and the integration of AI into military operations.
Concerns about cooperation between Russia, China, and North Korea on nuclear programs and the potential use of nuclear weapons by Russia were highlighted.
The group urged global leaders to collaborate in addressing existential threats to reverse the clock’s progression.
The basically changed the scale in the 90’s when everyone thought history was over, and announced as much. This is like maybe nine minutes on the old scale.
Oh I never knew that!
Yeah. To be clear, I don’t know if they called it a scale change, but “we need to start considering more, weaker crises because there aren’t big ones anymore” was the gist.
Oh I guess that makes sense in a post superpower era. Everything became smaller proxy conflicts.
To be clear, the thinking at the time was more like an eternal one-superpower era. There was a guy who literally wrote an essay called “The End Of History?” that basically talked about less and less conflict happening, and everything gradually becoming a capitalist democracy in the image of the US.