Who Sets the Doomsday Clock?

jelizondo writes:

Recently Popular Mechanics published a report titled Who sets the doomsday clock?. It is a very interesting report and while a bit lengthy, it is perfect to reflect, as we approach a new year, on the fragility of our civilization and indeed, our very existence. Enjoy!

On a warm day in mid-July, a roomful of Nobel laureates and nuclear security experts, some 80 pairs of eyes, gaze out of the expansive windows of a 10th floor University of Chicago conference room, imagining their deaths by nuclear explosion. A presenter directs the group's attention past the trees and gothic buildings of campus, over the apartment buildings in Hyde Park, and out to the Chicago skyline, hazy with wildfire smoke from Canada. He points out which neighborhoods would vanish in blasts of varying size, estimating casualties, injuries, and radiation effects.

[...] It's the opening session of the three-day 2025 Nobel Laureate Assembly for the Prevention of Nuclear War. The gathering is convened by scientists and nuclear security experts alarmed that a new arms race, eroding global cooperation, and the rise of artificial intelligence in warfare-among other factors-are pushing civilization closer to catastrophe. Timed to the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test, the world's first nuclear explosion, the assembly aims to produce a declaration urging world leaders to reduce the nuclear threat.

The same urgency drives the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and its iconic Doomsday Clock, the stark graphic that represents how close we are to self-annihilation. The clock is set yearly by the Bulletin's Science and Security Board chaired by Daniel Holz, PhD, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Chicago.

In January, six months before the Nobel Assembly, Holz stood at a lectern at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., to announce the time. "It is now 89 seconds to midnight," he said, as four solemn presenters swiveled a turntable to reveal a pared-down quarter clockface, a white wedge rimmed by black dots for numbers, the hands angled so sharply they overlapped. It was the closest to midnight since the clock's inception in 1947.

[...] Humans have been telling stories about the apocalypse for thousands of years, at least-often involving divine punishment by natural disaster. But the nuclear age marked a new reality that our end could be self-inflicted. The Doomsday Clock is an early symbol of that awareness-and it began as an artist's vision. In 1947, painter Martyl Langsdorf, wife of Manhattan Project physicist Alexander Langsdorf Jr., was asked to design a cover for the Bulletin's first magazine-length issue. She sketched her idea on the back of a copy of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas, choosing a minimalist clock to convey the "panicky time" and setting the hands seven minutes to midnight because it "suited [her] eye."

Today the clock-setting is more complicated than when nuclear weapons were the only way we knew we could extinct ourselves. The single time represents the board's analysis of the dangers posed by a set of distinct, complex, and intersecting threats in four focus areas: nuclear weapons, climate change, disruptive technologies, and biological threats.

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