The Doomsday Clock is managed by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, specifically its Science and Security Board, a group of global experts in nuclear risk, climate change, and disruptive technologies, who consult with Nobel laureates and other experts to decide on the clock's setting each year.
The Doomsday Clock is set every year by the Bulletin's Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes nine Nobel laureates.
When the Doomsday Clock hits midnight, it symbolizes humanity reaching the point of "global catastrophe," meaning civilization as we know it ends due to self-inflicted threats like nuclear war, climate collapse, or disruptive technologies, though it's a metaphor, not a prediction, meant to spur action by showing we've crossed a critical threshold. It signifies a point of no return where the lights go out and we've essentially destroyed the world with our own dangerous tech, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
It is now 89 seconds to midnight.
While the Doomsday Clock has been criticized by some over the years as being alarmist and inaccurate, its operators maintain they are drawing a conclusion from events and trends, not trying to predict the future. "The Bulletin is a bit like a doctor making a diagnosis," they write.
While the clock being close to midnight might make it seem that the world is headed toward a global catastrophe, this result isn't considered inevitable. The Doomsday Clock is not a typical clock because it can also move backward, so there is still time to change the countdown to midnight.
Clocks may have to skip a second — called a "negative leap second" — around 2029, a study in the journal Nature said Wednesday. "This is an unprecedented situation and a big deal," said study lead author Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.
Until recently, the closest it had ever been set was at two minutes to midnight—first in 1953, when the U.S. and Soviet Union both tested thermonuclear weapons, and then in 2018, citing “a breakdown in the international order” of nuclear actors, as well as the continuing lack of action on climate change.
On January 28, 2025, the Clock was moved to 89 seconds (1 minute, 29 seconds) before midnight, the closest it has ever been set to midnight since its inception in 1947. In addition to last year's concerns, the increased usage of artificial intelligence in both the battlefield and social media was noted as a new factor.
The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was a direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and was the moment when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict.
In short: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the symbolic Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds before midnight, the closest in its history, citing unchecked nuclear modernization, worsening climate inaction, and the rise of AI and disinformation.
The Duc d'Orleans Breguet Symapthique Clock currently stands as the world's most expensive clock auctioned at $6.8 million (£5.2 million).
The clock will continue to run down until it hits zero, at which time our carbon budget would be depleted and the likelihood of even more devastating global climate impacts would be very high.
Jeff Bezos has funded the construction of the 10,000- Year Clock, a monumental timepiece designed to tick once a year for the next 10,000 years. Built inside a mountain in Texas, the clock was originally envisioned by inventor Danny Hillis to promote long-term thinking and sustainability.
This ensemble of devices, collectively called Master Clock 2, keeps official US time, and it has ticked continuously, every second of every minute of every hour, since 1995. (There used to be a Master Clock 1 as well, and the Time Service Department alternated between the two.
It basically is an app where you feed in all your health information, personal information, social information — any fact about you — and it promises to tell you your death date." Ethicist Art Caplan discusses the potential accuracy of a death clock app and the need for related health counseling.
The Argument: The G-Zero lack of international leadership, the report forecast, would create vacuums that allow for greater geopolitical conflict, disruption, instability, while emboldening rogue-state and non-state actors to create new risks in outer space, under the sea, and in international airspace.
2030 is considered a critical deadline, a "point of no return," for climate action because scientists warn that surpassing 1.5°C (2.7°F) of global warming around that time risks triggering irreversible "tipping points," like melting permafrost releasing methane or Amazon rainforest dieback, leading to self-reinforcing warming loops that humanity can't stop, making catastrophic climate change much harder or impossible to avoid, even with future emissions cuts, according to reports from the UN IPCC, Science News and other experts.
THE working class of the country is all set to go on a massive countrywide general strike on July 9, 2025. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the working class will be the peasantry – both peasants and agricultural workers, who will be flooding the streets across the country in solidarity with the workers.
Immediate impact of the Chernobyl accident. The accident caused the largest uncontrolled radioactive release into the environment ever recorded for any civilian operation, and large quantities of radioactive substances were released into the air for about 10 days.
Our pick for the best silent alarm clock is the Philips SmartSleep Wake-Up Light, which uses light to mimic a natural sunrise and gently wakes you up.
A haunting symbol born from regret, the Doomsday Clock was created in 1947 by the same brilliant minds who developed the atomic bomb. Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and their fellow Manhattan Project scientists designed this warning system to alert humanity to the dangers they had unleashed.
On April 13, 2029 (which happens to be Friday the 13th), something unsettling will happen. A decent-sized asteroid, the 1,100-foot-wide Apophis, will pass so close to Earth it'll be visible in the sky from certain places. Crucially, the giant rock will not strike our humble planet.
Parfit points out that the Earth will remain habitable for around a billion years. And these might be lower bounds on our potential: if humanity is able to expand beyond Earth, it could greatly increase the human population and survive for trillions of years.
A 300m-wide asteroid will not hit the Earth in 2036, US astronomers say. It was thought there was a one-in-200,000 chance that it could strike on 13 April 2036, but revised calculations have now ruled this out. Instead, Nasa scientists said it would not get closer than 31,000km as it flies past on this date.