Humanity is approaching the abyss driven, mainly, by the drift of the president of the United States, Donald Trump, leader of the , promoter of obsolete o and detonator of new conflicts, such as the and threats to the . These new spurs of self-destruction have joined the and the , among other conflicts. With this distribution on the world stage, those responsible for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, who adjust each year the symbolic (Doomsday Clock), have placed the end of the world only 85 seconds away this year, four seconds less than last year and closer than ever to the apocalypse. The reasons are the inability of politicians to tackle weapons, biological, ecological challenges and those created by AI, such as disinformation.
This end-of-days stopwatch is a symbolic mechanism used as a warning by the members of the Bulletin, a group of scientists created by Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer with several members of the Manhattan Project (the one who developed the first nuclear weapons). For 79 years, after analyzing the evolution of the previous year, they have adjusted the hands: in 1947, when the time was set for the first time, humanity was seven minutes away from midnight. Since then it has been advanced 27 times, including today.
Although the calculation of the members has received criticism for considering the chosen time model alarmist, the reduction of dimensions to more understandable scales is common practice. The geologist reduced 4.5 billion Earth years to just one, so the Roman Empire is located 10 seconds away from our days and the arrival of Christopher Columbus in America is only three seconds away.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists group is made up of top-level experts, including several Nobel Prize winners, who lend themselves to a game of hypotheses with parameters that include the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the climate crisis, wars and biological threats, such as exposure to diseases, and technological threats, such as the lack of regulation in artificial intelligence. The intention is merely exemplary, to alert the general population, policy makers and scientists of the threats to humanity and the need to slow down the pace with the adoption of production and life models that are less harmful to society and the planet.
This eventuality occurred in the 1990s, with the fall of the Soviet bloc and the Berlin Wall. Thus, in 1991, when George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and atomic disarmament was possible, the hands were 17 minutes before midnight, 7 minutes earlier than the previous year. But since then, and with the exception of 2010, the clock has always moved forward or, at best, remained static. In 2007, climate change was included as a serious danger for humanity and this factor has not stopped advancing the needles in all these years.
