According to scientists, the countdown to doomsday or apocalypse has started.

climate crisispotential danger of artificial intelligenceL, threat of use of nuclear weapons wars like ukraineor attempts to China, Russia and the United States To modernize our nuclear arsenals, bringing us even closer to the possibility end of the world,

It has been predicted doomsday clock, a symbolic device created by scientists, where the countdown has begun and “terrible trends are pointing the world towards global catastrophe.” But what mechanism is this?

And this is when the international nuclear arms race experienced its darkest episode with the launch of atomic bombs on Japanese cities by the United States in 1945. Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Then, a group of scientists from the Manhattan Project also get involved. Albert Einstein And twelve other Nobel laureates began publishing a magazine about the apocalyptic challenges faced by the nuclear threat.

Two years later, the symbolic but painful clock was activated, adding to its assessment the planet’s decline since 2007 due to global warming, the climate crisis and a lack of action from powers.

Start the countdown.

At the time of its construction, the clock was set to 11:53 p.m., seven minutes before midnight, a time that was symbolically established as fatal or apocalyptic.

Since then, the clock’s minute hand has moved away from or closer to 00:00 depending on decisions taken by world politicians regarding increased or decreased risks to humanity.

The moment when the hands were furthest from midnight was in 1991, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the official end of the Cold War, when the hands of the clocks moved back 17 minutes apart. A record that has never been recovered.

On the other hand, the closest moment to the end has come recently. This was in January 2024, when the planet was just 90 seconds away from midnight for the second year in a row. On this occasion it was included in the provisional assessment Russia’s war against Ukraine, climate crisis or the possibility of other Pandemics, such as COVID-19.

near the end.

since 1949 the Soviet Union Even after conducting its first nuclear test, the clock is still ticking towards the end.

Since then, according to various nuclear proliferation events, the minute hand has been adjusted more than twenty times, ranging from 17 minutes to 90 seconds.

Thus, in January 2007, for the fourth time since the Cold War, nuclear scientists advanced the clock to 11:55, five minutes before the disaster, due to “growing concerns about a second nuclear era marked by grave dangers”. That time. In the statement, experts warned that “the threats posed by climate change are almost as serious as those from nuclear weapons.”

And the bad times, when the clocks are turning dangerously fast, have not diminished.

Return to 20th Century Programme.

In 2018 the clock returned to the time of the last century for the first time when it was set two minutes before midnight. Reason: American President’s arrogant rhetoric Donald Trump, and crossing the dangers in between North Korea And his country.

Exactly in 2017, after Trump’s victory in the presidential elections, scientists, who had always turned the hands of the clock by a full minute, to their surprise, decided to adjust the clock by 30 seconds and place it at two and a half minutes from 00:00. decided.

And the ticking clock has been “adjusted” with that formula ever since, but always referring to the projected end, and not until now, as of January 2020, when the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the clock at 23:58:20. and issued international warnings that security at the time was more dangerous than ever.

The statement at the time said, “Humanity faces two existential threats simultaneously: nuclear war and climate change, which are exacerbated by a threat multiplier, a cyber information war, which increases society’s ability to respond.” weakens the capacity.”

Our time is up.

“We are running out of time and have a critical decade to confront this,” the US atmospheric chemist said in 2019. susan solomon And this happened two years before the last adjustment in January 2024, just 90 seconds away from facing the hypothetical disaster.

Currently, experts warn that international security is at a level of threat similar to “the worst moments of the Cold War”, when it seemed that the nuclear threat was pushing the world into the abyss.

This was called the “new abnormality”, and was defined as “a landscape in constant change, where conflicts escalate” and the chances of military conflict breaking out increases.

“We would very much like to turn the clock back, but we have to respond to what’s happening in the world,” physicist Daniel Holz, co-chairman of the board that sets the position of the hands each year, told EFE. told. January 2023, which required “If you look at what’s happening in Ukraine, the climate disasters… it’s very difficult to say that things are getting better.”