War is looming much closer than most of the people that live in calm environments probably believe. The Doomsday Clock is a concept that is part of a website (https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/) that gauges our proximity both to large-scale war as well as unwanted alterations to our environment, or more generally, the likelihood of human extinction during the year that the “time until midnight” is published. The creators of the website use this metaphor to communicate the severity of the aforementioned dangers to human civilization. Midnight represents the human extinction event, and the proximity to it is referred to using time with an example being “90 seconds to midnight,” which was the decision by the creators for last year.
That is the closest that the clock has gotten to midnight in quite a while due to the many conflicts in the Middle East as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Bryce Beckley finds this to be new and also very concerning, saying that “he wishes he knew about this before.” Climate change and other similar unfortunate events are also occurring around the globe, such as problems with the ocean currents due to the melting of freshwater ice. The only time the clock has been as close as it is now in the past 10 years was right after the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. This puts into perspective simply how close we could be to nuclear devastation. Climate change has been advancing as well, with the global temperature rising and destroying habitats for humans and wildlife alike. Large-scale life other than humans is quite crucial to our society, as well as our survival as a species. The most obvious examples would be bees and plants.
Global warming is a more preventable issue, since it is caused by multiple humans rather than the rash decisions of a small group of people in power. We need to keep this in mind as we progress, rather than the greedy notion of land and money.
