The cosmologist Stephen Hawking recently suggested that civilization is at a critical juncture in its short—on geological timescales—career. We live in the "most dangerous time for our planet" due to climate change, the sixth mass extinction, and emerging technologies—and if we fail to proceed with great caution and wisdom, our species could follow the dodo into an existential oblivion.
To alert the public of the greatest dangers facing humanity, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock in 1947. Its time represents our collective proximity to a global catastrophe. The closest the clock has ever been to midnight—or doom—was in 1953, after the US and Soviet Union detonated thermonuclear weapons. The furthest away it's been happened in 1991, when the clock stood at a somewhat reassuring 17 minutes before midnight, following the official end of the Cold War.
Unfortunately, the minute hand has been ominously ticking forward in recent years, and on January 26 the Bulletin announced that it would move the clock forward even more to a mere two and a half minutes before doom. The only time the clock has indicated a higher threat level was in 1953—a fact that should make one uneasy, at the very least, about our collective future on spaceship Earth. While the Bulletin originally considered only the threat of nuclear weapons, it recently added climate change to the list of global, transgenerational risks. Given President Donald Trump's reckless statements about nuclear proliferation and the Republican's rampant climate denialism, it should not come as a surprise that "doom-soon" is now more probable than it was a year ago.
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