People have worried about the end of the world for millennia, but it was only in 1945, when nuclear weapons were invented, that we began to think humans ourselves might be responsible for the apocalypse. The scientists who created the atomic bomb were urgently concerned with the possibility of nuclear armageddon, and when they started a magazine in 1947 – the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – the cover showed a clock with its hands at seven minutes to midnight.

The hands of the Doomsday Clock, as it became known, are now adjusted each year to represent our current proximity to global catastrophe. While the threat of nuclear conflict receded somewhat with the end of the Cold War, other Earth-sized dangers have appeared on the scene.

This week the Bulletin released its latest assessment: we are at 90 seconds to midnight, as close to doom as we have ever been. According to Rumtin Sepasspour, who studies global catastrophic risks and what we can do about them, there are four main drivers of our planetary peril: the now-familiar prospect of nuclear armageddon, the slower but more certain threats of climate change, the growing danger of pandemics and biological weapons, and the dramatic disruptions brought by the rapid progress of artificial intelligence.

Critics say the clock’s attempt to quantify the risk of doom is subjective, and sometimes makes little sense. How can you measure the Cuban Missile Crisis and the chance of killer super-COVID on the same scale?

The critics make some good points, Sepasspour writes, but they are perhaps asking a lot of an annual attention-raising exercise: “The Doomsday Clock is not a risk assessment. It’s a metaphor. It’s a symbol. It is, for lack of a better term, a vibe.”

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