“Yet that pathetic pendulum Keeps esoteric time.”
– Emily Dickinson (Poetry: ’T was later when the summer went.)

The Biblical “Doomsday” alludes to the end of the world in general. It isn’t exclusive to Christianity, either; the Mayan calendar, for instance, predicted that the world would end on 21 December 2012. I was reading an article on some of the failed doomsday prophecies, such as the 2012 Maya Apocalypse, Halley’s Comet Panic, and Montanism, a schismatic Christian movement that started in Phrygia (modern-day Turkey) in the second century.
For nearly as long as humanity has existed, there have been various predictions of its end made by religious leaders, scientists, and even a hen (or so it seemed). These predictions have included comets, floods, and fires. Fortunately for us, none of them have materialised thus far!

Predicting doomsday is a fancy exercise; estimating our proximity to it based on existential crises brought on by problems like nuclear war, biothreats (like Covid-19), artificial intel- ligence, and the climate catastrophe, and presuming that it can be reversed, is fancier. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been readjusting the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic countdown to human extinction, every January since it was first created in a post-World War II scenario in 1947. It serves as a warning about the num- ber of figurative “minutes to mid- night” that humanity has left. The goal is to alert people and motivate them to take action.

Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and other scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, which created the first nuclear weapons, launched the Bulletin in 1945. Two years later, the clock came to represent the world’s susceptibility to Disasters. Striking midnight symbolises a global catastrophe the end of the world. Thus, “Midnight” signifies more than just the constant threat of war. The world is thought to be closer to a potential apocalypse the closer the clock is to midnight.

However, Paul Dukes, a British historian at the University of Aberdeen, examined the evolution of the predicament symbolised by the setting of the Doomsday Clock at a few minutes to midnight in his 2011 book “Minutes to Midnight: History and the Anthropocene Era from 1763,” paying particular attention to the history of the time, the study of the subject, and significant advancements in the natural sciences, where Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson laid the groundwork for a scientific approach to the pre-industrial stages of historical development in the Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century and when the American and French Revolutions created a vocabulary of modernity.

Since the Doomsday Clock has remained at ninety seconds to midnight this year, scientists warned that “billions of lives” are in danger. In fact, the Bulletin’s figurative Doomsday Clock was set to 90 seconds to midnight last year the closest it had been since it started to tick following World War II. In 2023, a group of international experts comprising ten Nobel laureates declared that the invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s “thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons” were the main reasons why humanity’s survival was in more dan- ger than it had ever been.

The Bulletin said in its 2024 announcement that a number of global threats had an impact on their decision, such as the climate crisis and 2023’s official designation as the hottest year on record, the Russia- Ukraine war and the breakdown of nuclear arms reduction agreements, and the dramatic advancement of generative AI, which has the potential to magnify disinformation and corrupt the global information environment. The organisation’s president and CEO, Rachel Bronson, stated, “Ninety seconds to midnight is profoundly unsustainable.” Since its establishment in 1947, when it was first set at “seven minutes to mid-night,” the Clock has undergone 25 adjustments to reflect global events that pose a threat to humankind. During the height of the Cold War,
the closest the clock got to midnight was 11:58 p.m. in 1953, following the detonation of the first thermonuclear weapon, a hydrogen bomb. The clock was set at 17 minutes from
midnight and moved the furthest away from danger in the early 1990s, following the optimism surrounding the end of the Cold War.

Since then, it has been getting closer to extinction. The Bulletin started considering cata-strophic interruptions resulting from climate change in its hand-setting discussions in 2007. And now a new era has arrived in 2024; AI is on the list, which may be a sign that the dooms- day narrative about AI has been acknowledged. “Make no mistake: resetting the Clock at 90 seconds to midnight is not an indication that the world is stable. Quite the opposite. It’s urgent for governments and communities around the world to act,” Bron- son said in a statement.

“The risks from last year continue with unabated veracity and continue to shape this year.” How can the clock be turned back? In his 2024 Doomsday Clock Statement, “A moment of historic danger: It is still 90 seconds to midnight,” John Mecklin, the Science and Security Board Editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, wrote: “These threats, singularly and as they interact, are of such a character and magnitude that no one nation or leader can bring them under control.” Well, will powerful world leaders work together to check if the clock is about to turn back soon? However, hope appears to be dim amid the current global perspective with the on-going Israel-Hamas con- flict and the war caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Will the clock ever strike mid-night? Perhaps not. Because if the end of the world arrives, who will change the clock, and for whom? For the first seven decades, the clock’s changes were made in minutes. The clock was first moved forward in 2017 by a fraction of a minute thirty seconds, to beexact and was settotwo and a half minutes before midnight. Given that it is getting too close to midnight, it appears that it will now advance or revert by a few seconds only. In the future, it might even be changed by a fraction of a second. Who knows? We never give up hope that midnight will never arrive. The Doomsday clock aggregates the state of the world’s conditions in an attempt to project the scenario on a larger scale. But is it the same for everyone and everywhere?

Everywhere in the world, the common person is primarily concerned with her own personal welfare. Her loved ones are the centre of her modest and intimate world. Furthermore, at the micro level, a large number of people may have actually crossed midnight in wartorn places, for example. And some people are truly only a few seconds away from apocalyptic midnight in various parts of the planet. The remaining, however, will stay well away from midnight. To be honest, indefinitely.

(The writer is Professor of Statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.)