For nearly 80 years, a global alarm clock has been ticking away. Its hands have been set and reset more than 25 times, sometimes backwards, but too often creeping forward to oblivion. How close is that clock to going off this year?
That’s the annual question posed by the keepers of the Doomsday Clock. It's not an actual clock, but it is an urgent warning to humanity — a metaphorical yet nevertheless ominous countdown to existential midnight, the end of the world as we know it.
Time on the Doomsday Clock
For 2025, the Bulletin elected to set the clock even closer to doom.
"The world has not made sufficient progress on existential risks threatening all of humanity," said Daniel Holz, chair of the Bulletin's science and security board, in a news conference announcing the new time on January 28, 2025. "Every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster."
"It is now 89 seconds to midnight," Holz announced.
While advancing the clock by one symbolic second might not seem like the end of the world, Holz offered a different perspective.
"Because the world is already perilously close to the precipice, any move towards midnight should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning," he said.
Read More: What Is Time?
Creating the Doomsday Clock
Devised and kept by the nonprofit Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the idea behind the clock is to remind the general public, policymakers, and other scientists “how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making,” and to advance discussions and ideas for reducing human-made threats to our own extinction, according to the organization’s mission.
When the Doomsday Clock was first conceived in 1947, nuclear weapons were the technology of greatest concern to the Bulletin, whose founders included Manhattan Project alums. Early leaders and contributors included some of the field’s most noteworthy names: Albert Einstein, for example, created the organization’s first board of sponsors. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb himself, was the first chairman of that board.
Over time, other issues besides nuclear proliferation have informed the organization’s temporal deliberations. In 2007, for example, climate change first played a role in the setting of the hands (at five minutes to midnight). In 2020, the Bulletin cited the COVID-19 pandemic as a new factor in determining the setting of the clock.
It's worth noting that the Bulletin has also moved the hands back several times, often in response to improved relations between super-powers. In 1991, the hands sat at 17 minutes to midnight, the furthest away ever, thanks to the end of the Cold War and the signing of the START treaty between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. By 2023, however, the Bulletin’s science and security board elected to set the hands at 90 seconds to midnight — and kept the clock at that time in 2024 — as close as those metaphorical hands had ever come to striking 12.
Read More: The Doomsday Clock in Fiction and Reality
Who Watches the Watchmen?
Over the decades, the warning symbolized by the Doomsday Clock has become a fixture in popular culture, evoked in numerous songs, films, comics, and other venues. Every January, the Bulletin holds a new press conference to announce the next setting of the clock. And those annual settings are attended with a kind of fretful enthusiasm — a bit like Groundhog Day, if Punxsutawney Phil was the herald of nuclear winter, with no spring ever to come again.
Still, critics of the clock — and there are many, spread across both the political and scientific landscape — dismiss the whole concept as fear-mongering theater, not the sort of thing you’d expect from an organization created by scientists. Historically, opponents have also taken the Bulletin to task for its methodology in setting the clock, which is seen as imprecise, difficult to quantify, and even capricious. (Clock detractors like to point out that the initial 1947 setting, at seven minutes to midnight, was chosen merely because its original designer, artist Martyl Langsdorf, thought “it looked good to my eye.”)
Nevertheless, supporters and the Bulletin itself maintain that the clock is an iconic metaphor, “a reminder of the perils we must address if we are to survive on the planet,” according to the website. And the perils cited this year are all too familiar — and all too worrisome.
"We set the clock closer to midnight because we do not see sufficient positive progress on the global challenges we face, including nuclear risk, climate change, biological threats, and advances in disruptive technologies" such as AI, among others, Holz noted. "All of these dangers are greatly exacerbated by a potent threat multiplier: The spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that degrade the communication ecosystem and increasingly blur the line between truth and falsehood."
And so, the Doomsday Clock ticks on, yet another second closer to midnight, but still not quite reaching it. At least, not this year.
Read More: 20 Ways the World Could End
This article has been updated. Portions of this story were originally published on Jan. 20, 2022.
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The Clock Shifts
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Leadership
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. COVID-19 and the Doomsday Clock: Observations on managing global risk
National Park Service. Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 1991
Before he became editor of Discover in 2012, Steve spent more than 20 years as a writer and editor, specializing in health and medicine. He began his career at a scientific, technical and medical publisher, then moved to consumer-oriented publications, where his work has appeared in Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, Prevention, Outside and dozens of other magazines and web sites.
