Doomsday Clock was reset Thursday to just 100 seconds before midnight

Doomsday Clock was reset Thursday to just 100 seconds before midnight

The Doomsday Clock was reset Thursday to just 100 seconds before midnight -- the closest we have ever been to the complete and total annihilation of the earth (well, at least metaphorically).




Midnight on the Clock symbolizes the end of the world, and each year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists decides what time it is.

"It is 100 seconds to midnight. We are now expressing how close the world is to catastrophe in seconds -- not hours, or even minutes," the Bulletin's President Rachel Bronson said in a statement. "We now face a true emergency -- an absolutely unacceptable state of world affairs that has eliminated any margin for error or further delay

So what factors determine how close we are to midnight? Mainly, the threat of nuclear weapons and climate change, Bronson said.

When the Clock was created in 1947, the greatest threat to humanity was nuclear war as the US and Soviet Union were headed into a nuclear arms race.

"But in 2007, we felt we couldn't answer those questions without including climate change,"

In recent years, the Bulletin's panel of scientists and other experts has started to look at other "disruptive technologies," including artificial intelligence, gene editing, and cyber threats, Bronson said.




While climate change and the nuclear threat remain the main factors, the Bulletin has identified "cyber intrusions and fake news as a threat enabler," Bronson said. "The information environment has become complicated and increasingly difficult to separate out facts from fiction, and that has made all the other threats more significant."

The same threats, just amplified
In 2018, the clock was set to 11:58 p.m. and it remained that way for 2019 as the threat of North Korea's nuclear weapons and climate change had the world on its toes.

This past year, those same threats were just amplified, moving the Clock ever closer to midnight.

In 2019, the nuclear threat rose with both North Korea and Iran.




The historic meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un by President Donald Trump and South Korea's Moon Jae-in initially raised hopes of a possible deal on denuclearization, but there has been no significant progress made. North Korea has threatened to abandon negotiations with the US altogether, saying the last year and a half of talks was "lost time."