This Thursday, January 14 at 10AM ET, atomic scientists will reset the “Doomsday Clock” to show us whether they think the humanity is getting closer or further from total annihilation.
Established in 1947 and moved 18 times in the past 65 years, the Doomsday Clock evaluates the “means humankind could use to obliterate itself” (such as nuclear weapons), then uses the number of “minutes to midnight” to represent how close they believe the human species is to “catastrophic destruction,” where midnight represents “doomsday”.
The last time the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago reset the Doomsday Clock was in 2007, when they moved the clock from seven to five minutes to midnight.
How do the atomic scientists decide whether to move the clock forward or back?
The executive director of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists told Politico,
