A doomsday clock created by Einstein shows that we are close to total destruction

The myth of the end of the world is a passageway full of meanings and possible interpretations that can be taken in multiple directions.

In your own way, All great civilizations and religions have their story about how things will end.the beings, the different lives and realities that surround us.

But this terminal crisis of existence, which often threatens us from the movie and television screens or from the pages of some science fiction novel, hides a terminological trap where it would be advisable to stop.

No matter how much we are warned about “the end of the world”, the truth is that it will not be “the world” that will end, but rather us, the humanity that inhabits it.

The “world” itself has existed for a long time without us, and so will continue to exist even if nothing remains of the human species on him.

It is difficult to know if any of this was passing through the minds of the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists) in 1947, when they wound, for the first time, the “Apocalypse Clock”, “End of the World Clock” or Doomsday Clockits name in English.

After all, the existence of time always requires the presence of someone who can time it.

However, in those days, at the University of Chicago in the United States, a group of scientists, including Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, decided to graph this idea of civilization put in crisis through a symbolic clock whose needles approach or move away from the critical limit represented by midnight.

He Doomsday Clock It is an artificial and fictitious calculation plane, but fueled by the threats of a real world. The minutes that separate us from that midnight represent the period of time between the continuity of human life and its destruction “total and catastrophic.”

At the beginning of the 1950s, this catastrophe threshold was almost exclusively represented by the threat of large-scale conflictWhen the Second World War ended, the United States and the Soviet Union began their insane process of accumulating nuclear weapons.

But today, in this first half of the 21st century, the hands of the clock are driven or slowed down by the emergence of new dangerssome of them paradoxically presented as drivers of an improvement in our lives and not as triggers for extinction.

Since its creation, the image of the clock has appeared on all the covers of the Bulletin. Now it appears, menacingly, in the upper right corner of its web page, barely marking 90 seconds to midnight. Since it was put into “operation”, it has never been so close to the line of no return.

In 1947, when the co-founder of BulletinHyman Goldsmith, asked the artist Martyl Langsdorf (wife of then Manhattan Project physicist Alexander Langsdorf) to design the cover of the publication, she presented him with the idea of ​​the clock as a simple but tremendously effective representation of human expectation and as a mechanism to activate a state of alert.

Since then, Martyl’s watch (redesigned in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell) absorbs the terrors and anxieties of each era in which it has to be updated.

The Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists meets twice a year to evaluate the global situation and agree on which direction the hands will move, that is, whether they will move closer to or further away from midnight. But it is not about modifying a mechanical contraptionbut of updating a mental image that condenses on the clock the deadly and ominous punctuation of an advance towards annihilation.

Although the Board proceeds by calculations and abstractions, by statistics and social hunches, the silent gear that moves the clock is oiled from the pages of newspapers, news and television news programs and the increasingly less controllable flow of information that runs through the Internet. at the speed of light.

The hands, then, have already “moved” twenty-five times since the creation of the clock. The bad news is that, in the last ten years, after some setbacks, we have not stopped approaching the limit of destruction.

Since 1945, when the Manhattan Project group of researchers created the Bulletinthe mysteries that surround this aura of possible extinction have become more hermetic and diffuse, increased by a new type of arms race that has its point of greatest conflict in artificial intelligence.

In the latest update, which has placed us barely 90 seconds from annihilation, the scientists of the Bulletin point to the escalation of the war in Ukraine, the increase in the negative effects associated with climate change (2023 was the hottest year in history) and disruptive technological advance as the dramatic markers of a certain possibility of death that is becoming increasingly more concrete and appreciable in the landscape of global social reality.

Martyl had suggested the idea of ​​the clock as a way to capture urgency. Legend claims that he drew the first sketch of it on the back cover of a volume with transcriptions of Beethoven’s sonatas.

He Bulletin It warned of the dangers of mass destruction in a period in which nuclear war sustained the dominant weapons supply programs. Martyl’s image, therefore, allowed readers a concrete anticipation of what might be to come. The hands indicated a time limitbut they also suggested a countdown. Fear and waiting summarized in the heart of a machine. The apocalypse was then set at seven minutes to midnight.

Starting in 1949, the minute hand began to capture the global mood, moving forward or backward between growing fear and brief streaks of hope in the face of disarmament programs and agreements concluded between the powers.

“Today we reset the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight because humanity continues to face an unprecedented level of danger. Our decision should not be interpreted as a sign that the situation of international security has improved. Leaders and citizens around the world must take this statement as a stark warning and respond urgently, as if today were the most dangerous moment in modern history. Because it might as well be.” The latest update of Bulletin It reflects a humanity that has become accustomed to living with the horizon of catastrophe.

To the nuclear and environmental threat indices, a large-scale technological trap has now been added that resists and escapes even the scientific community’s own prediction capacity.

The still barely hinted at possibilities of language models like chatGPT take the possibilities of danger to very high levels.

In that sense, the time progression of the apocalypse leaves no room for doubt. The number of minutes until midnight is corrected periodicallybut its trend now seems irreversible. On January 25, 2018, it moved forward from “3 minutes to midnight (where it had been since January 17, 2017) to “two and a half minutes to midnight.”

It was updated in 2018 to “two minutes” and remained there throughout 2019. In January 2020 it moved forward twenty seconds and in January 2023 another 10, stopping at the current 90 secondswhich is the moment in which it has been closest to midnight throughout its history.

Not even during the Cold War, after the nuclear tests with which the United States and the Soviet Union intimidated each other with the world as an undaunted witnesshad come so far.

In 1961, Gary H. Higgins, director of the Plowshare Division – created by the famous Edward Teller, father of the H bomb – warned that a nuclear weapons competition was going to dominate the future, and that this would cause humanity to take a huge self-awarenessin contradiction to the “oversimplified” imagery provided by religion and ethics.

Today, in open contradiction to Higgins’ predictions, humanity seems blinded and aligned with renewed weapons programs that only ensure catastrophe.

Meanwhile, only a few artists seem to have become truly aware of the threat. In 2 Minutes to Midnightthe English heavy metal band Iron Maiden describe a kind of post-nuclear hell where mythological beasts and remains of human beings compete for the remains of a world of sorcery devastated by catastrophe.

In 1986, another Briton, the comic book writer Alan Moore, set his dystopian fantasy of (anti)superheroes in an alternative United States where Nixon has won re-election after his victory in Vietnam and is now facing the most difficult of decisions: whether or not to go to nuclear war against the USSR.

In some of the best vignettes of Watchmenthe doomsday clock clocks a collective state of mind that, at times, seems anchored in the idea that only a world without a future can afford to ignore its own history.