By: Violet Gillett
We’ve all seen those cheesy end of the world movies, zombie outbreaks, ice caps melting and throwing the whole world an ice age, world wide pandemic killing millions. Speculating about the end of the world is just part of what makes us human, but for some, speculating the end of the world is their job.
The Doomsday Clock sounds like something right out of an Sci-Fi, but it’s a real thing. It serves as an assessment of all the threats humanity faces at one time, and gives us a warning about how we are to killing off our entire species. Fun stuff. At the present time the clock is 100 seconds to midnight. Midnight being the Doomsday, the farthest being 17 minutes to Midnight in 1991.The Board of Atomic Scientists created the Clock of Doom in 1947, originally set seven minutes to midnight by Martyl Langsdorf because it “looked good to my eye.”
The Doomsday Clock is a pretty simple machine. The Board meets yearly to decide if the clock should be moved, and if so how far depending on the current threats the world is facing at the moment. This year moving it to the closest it’s been midnight ever in it’s nearly 75 year existence. 2020 has outperformed the Cold War. Congrats 2020.
Some claim the Doomsday Clock is just a scare tactic to force a political agenda, but the Board replied with “Ensuring the survival of our societies and the human species is not a political agenda. Cooperating with other countries to achieve control of extremely dangerous technologies should not involve partisan politics.”