Eighty-nine seconds to the end of the world. That's what the Doomsday Clock is telling us. So here we are: World War Three and it's over. Who would have thought? Our so-called civilization — with all its museums, all its libraries, all its works of art, all those wonderful inventions, all the progress of medicine, all the good and the beautiful and the best of this world — together with all of us apathetic, gullible, oblivious souls, will first be roasted alive and then turned into radioactive dust. End of humanity. We deserve nothing less. Where is this humanity, after all? I see it only in the magnificent world of animals. Earthlings needed far more growing up before they deserved this planet. The hunger for power is going to annihilate us — and the fact that it will also evaporate all those who caused this horror is cold comfort indeed. And yet…
The Doomsday Clock
Let's look more closely at the data. The Doomsday Clock started ticking in 1947 — ironically, in the most warlike country on earth: the United States. That year, a group of credentialed atomic scientists, drawing on scientific, geopolitical and technological factors and still supported today by experts, Nobel laureates and global analysts, founded in Chicago the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which "calculated" (not "predicted") how much time humanity had left before its total self-destruction.
In 1947, the clock was set to seven minutes before the end. When those seven minutes expire — at "midnight" — the convergence of nuclear wars, climate collapse, uncontrolled pandemics and artificial intelligences run amok would bring Earth and its inhabitants to the brink of extinction.
Rebel, protest, resist — now it depends only on us
Where exactly are we now? We set out at 23:53:00 and we are currently at 23:58:31. Incredible? Not at all. Not even slightly. The "peace" that has existed since the end of the Second World War is no peace whatsoever. I'm no historian or analyst, but off the top of my head: Korea, Vietnam, Arab-Israeli Wars, Iran-Iraq, Russia-Afghanistan, Gulf War, Yugoslav Wars, USA-Afghanistan, Iraq, Arab Spring and civil wars in Syria, Libya, Yemen. Not counting dozens of civil wars and armed conflicts across Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America. And I haven't even listed the hundreds of other conflicts, armed clashes and territorial wars.
And today? To continue this charming habit of slaughtering one another for power and money, we have the remarkable (so to speak) figure of 56 active conflicts, including Myanmar, Yemen, Sudan, Ethiopia, Congo, the Sahel, Somalia, Haiti and the India-Pakistan standoff. To frame it all: the interminable Russia-Ukraine war. And thanks to the hyperactive Israeli Prime Minister — who has opened fronts everywhere — we have an ongoing genocide in Palestine and an attack on Iran, supposedly because Iran now has an atomic bomb ready and waiting. Even though there's only the appearance of one, and in thirty years there has never been any proof. Then, last night, that reckless bully Trump took his "warriors" and bombed Iran's nuclear sites. What a man! What a strategist. Today he said: "Now let's work toward peace." Sure. I suspect those 89 seconds have gotten even shorter.
So what do we do — accept all of this? Resign ourselves? Look at our children and say, sorry, we're sorry?
And you, children — do you carry on scrolling, eyes down on your phones? No. Enough. We need to react, seriously. How? I've already told you: we are billions of people. If each of us makes even the smallest gesture of opposition, we can stop the hands of that clock. The Bulletin, each time it reports its calculations about nuclear war risk, international conflicts and superpower tensions, climate crisis, unregulated emerging technologies, global pandemics and worldwide political instability, continues — tirelessly — to remind us: "The clock is not destiny, but an alarm: we can still change course."
Alessandro Ippolito