By Tim Binnall
The 2025 update to the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic assessment of the catastrophic threats facing humanity, saw the metaphorical measurement advance one second closer to midnight. This year's evaluation was announced on Tuesday by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS), which has overseen the unsettling warning system since 1947. In explaining their assessment, the group noted that the new time is "the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its 78-year history." They went on to chillingly muse that the measurement "signals that the world is on a course of unprecedented risk and that continuing on the current path is a form of madness."
As for what those risks are, the BAS specifically pointed to the continued presence and proliferation of nuclear weapons and the worsening climate crisis. Additionally, the group cited the potential dangers of artificial intelligence, the threat of infectious diseases, and the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. These individual problems, they observed, are "greatly exacerbated by a potent threat multiplier: the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that degrade the communication ecosystem and increasingly blur the line between truth and falsehood." Lamenting what they see as little effort being made toward mitigating these risks, the group called upon the United States, Russia, and China to "pull the world back from the brink."
One cannot help but be skeptical that the group's latest words of warning will have any effect as the Doomsday Clock has been steadily advancing towards midnight since 2012. As the assessment has gotten increasingly perilous, the BAS has been forced to switch to measuring in seconds rather than minutes as there is precious little 'time' left on their clock. To that end, the one-second change this year is the smallest-ever update. Despite being rather diminutive in comparison to previous years, the BAS stressed that "a move of even a single second should be taken as an indication of extreme danger" or, if you're an optimist, that they could theoretically keep incrementally advancing the clock for another 89 years if we can last that long.