The Doomsday clock puts humanity 89 seconds from the disaster

On Sunday afternoon, I went to the national football conference championship match at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia. At one point at the beginning of the fourth quarter, the Philadelphia Eagles were on the 1 -meter line of the opposing Washington commanders, ready to execute their game of unstoppable fraternal thrust for a score. (Believe me – that has something to do with future perfect.)

Knowing that they would almost certainly abandon a touchdown, the commanders surpassed decided to do something a little different. First, a defender of the commanders deliberately jumped over the early line, leading to a penalty for the encroachment. Then they did it again – the same thing. And again – the same thing. They apparently intended to continue to jump the line, again and again. And each time, the referees have moved half the ball from the distance to the goal line, as happened when defensive penalties occur near the goals area.

Anyone who knows the principle of infinite divisibility in geometry can see the problem here. A line segment – like the distance here between the melee line and the goal area – can be infinitely divided, again and again. This means that theoretically, the commanders could have encroached, and the Eagles could have continued to advance half of the distance to the goal line without ever getting there, until the end of time.

Fortunately for the players, the coaches and nearly 70,000 fans present, the referees found a way to get out of this particular paradox by invoking a little -known NFL rule which allows the offense team to be automatically allocated A touchdown if the defense continues to commit deliberate penalties to arrest them. It was finally enough for the commanders to cut it.

All this brings us to a subject on which we have written several times here at Future Perfect: The Doomsday Clock. (You see, I told you that we would get there.)

Created and managed by the bulletin of atomic scientists, which was itself founded by many former physicists of the Manhattan project who had alarmed themselves by the threat of nuclear weapons, the day of the day. Each year, a group of experts in all, from nuclear science to climate change through cybersecurity, throws the hands of the clock. The closer it is to midnight, the closest humanity is supposed to be the closest to extinction.

In 2023, the bulletin made a new one when it moved the hands of the clock of 10 seconds, at 90 seconds until midnight – the closest it has been since its launch in 1947. Although it meant that humanity was supposed to be closer to the annihilation it had been as dangerous as 1964 (shortly after the Cuban missile crisis, when it was set at 12 minutes at midnight) or 1984 (shortly after one of the nuclear calls closest to the history of the Cold War, when he was 3 minutes from midnight), it was the first decor after Russia invaded Ukraine And noted nuclear fears at a height that they had not reached for decades.

Last year, quoting everything, from Ukraine to Gaza to climate change through growth in AI, the board of directors maintained the chronometer from 90 seconds to midnight.

And then yesterday morning, the board of directors revealed the new parameter of the clock. Adjust your conviction time to… Drumroll please: 89 seconds at midnight, a second closer.

The board of directors has listed a series of factors: continuous nuclear risk around Ukraine and the disintegration of nuclear weapons control; The growing impacts of climate change after what is probably the hottest year ever recorded; The threat of new diseases such as bird flu; The progress of AI, and in particular, potential military applications; and disinformation and cyber-in-escort.

If those who seem familiar, well, it is almost the same factors as the previous year, and the previous year, something of the chairman of the board of directors Daniel Holz recognized during the Tuesday event, Affirming that these factors were not new in 2024. But we have seen insufficient progress in the next generation of the main challenges, and in many cases, this leads to increasingly negative and disturbing effects. »»

However, everything on Tuesday’s announcement underlined an essential problem with the Doomsday clock. It is short of time – perhaps metaphorically, as it is supposed, in the case of the survival of humanity, but literally, in the sense that a clock has only so many hours, minutes and seconds.

And this problem is something from which the whole field of existential risk suffers. Like these arbitrators in Philadelphia, it is only so many times that you can issue a warning before you start to feel devoid of meaning, especially since we seem closer and closer to the annihilation without , absolutely, get there.

In a way, the Doomsday’s clock is a victim of its own success as an unequaled symbol of nuclear fear of the 20th century Cold War. The idea of ​​the hands of a clock was so convincing, which was moving around midnight when the missiles would launch, that the 1980s classic Guards The graphic novel used it as an unforgettable central motif.

Like James Bond Films and Rambo Films, however, the Doomsday’s clock suffered after the end of the Cold War and the apparent elimination of its reason for being: nuclear war. With this apparently threat behind us, the clock has extended to new threats such as climate change and infectious diseases, and later very in 2010, concerns such as disinformation and democratic retro-gliding.

The problem, as we have written before, is that non -nuclear existential risks simply do not integrate well in the metaphor of a clock. A nuclear war is largely a binary risk – the missiles pull, and the clock strikes 12, or they do not. And there is a whole area of ​​geopolitics and diplomacy dedicated to measuring just where the world is in nuclear risk. It is roughly as measurable and knowable as existential risks, which is why the Doomsday clock was so emblematic.

But other more recent existential risks do not work in this way – assuming that they are even, in fact, real existential risks. Climate change is not a binary but a cumulative and continuous risk, less sudden deadly heart than the case of planetary diabetes for life. If climate risk was a clock, it would be difficult to know what time it is, or even if the clock would really hit midnight.

The other risks are even more difficult to follow. Artificial intelligence has just experienced one of the most eventful weeks of its young story, because Deepseek of China has shown that advanced models could be cheaper and more difficult to suffocate than industry did not think, even if The great players of the American AI have lined up for an unprecedented accumulation of $ 500 billion. Is AI even an existential risk? Perhaps – although no one can tell you with certainty how much it could take place, or how really we are. And AI, unlike nuclear weapons, has advantages for science and society that we cannot simply set aside.

Regarding infectious diseases, as disturbing as recent bird flu epidemics have been, we have no certainty that it will indeed be the next pandemic – or how serious it would be if it would happen. A new virus will come for us, but there is a good chance that we are surprised by what it is, just as we were surprised by Covid. And the chances that such a virus would actually threaten us with extinction seem very low.

We live in a world which is currently flooded with fear, even if these fears are often overestimated and out of step of reality. I fear that, as the doomsday clock sets up in its initial accent on nuclear war – something that gets really worse – and leads these changes from minute to year, it will eventually burn the public that it is supposed to galvanize. You can only say that the world is about to finish so many times, only rises so many risks to the status of those existential, before people start to settle you.

A post-scriptum of this story on the game of Eagles: once the referees have made their final warning, the Eagles were able to manage their fraternal thrust and push the quarter-arre Jalen hurts in the goals for a touchdown, On the way to a dominant 55-23. victory. (Go Birds!) You can have all the warnings in the world – but that does not mean that you can prevent the inevitable from happening.