Featured Image Credit: Mark Wilson / Staff / Zeferli / Getty
While many of us kick off the year with resolutions and fresh starts, it’s also that time of the year we get a grim reminder of how close humanity is to catastrophe.
Every January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) updates the time on the Doomsday Clock.
If you're not familiar with the clock, it's basically a symbolic measure of how near we are to irreversible global disaster.
The Doomsday Clock was first created by the BAS in 1947 as the front cover for the group's monthly magazine. The hands were initially set at seven minutes to midnight because the creator Martyl Langsdorf thought it 'looked good to my eye'.
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Since then, the hands have moved forwards and backwards each January, reflecting the changing risks facing humanity.
The closer the hands get to midnight, the closer we are to a global disaster.
Last year, scientists left the clock at 90 seconds to midnight which marked the closest we've ever been to an apocalypse since the creation of the atomic bomb.
With war still raging in Ukraine and tensions rising across the Middle East, the risk of nuclear war is now 'far too high,' experts say.
"We are probably closer to nuclear war than at any point in the last forty years," Dr. Haydn Belfield, research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, told MailOnline.
But scientists warn that it's not just the nuclear weapons that will be our demise.
The BAS also flags climate change, advanced AI, and the mainstream of genetic engineering as major threats to humanity’s survival.
And if we were to look back on 2024, extreme temperatures and climate disasters would've certainly added fuel to the fire.
Although this year’s update hasn’t been revealed yet, the global situation suggests the clock’s hands might move even closer to midnight.
In 2024, Rachel Bronson, then president and CEO of the BAS, gave four key reasons why the clock was left at 90 seconds to midnight last year.
"The countries with nuclear weapons are engaged in modernisation programs that threaten to create a new nuclear arms race," Bronson said.
"Earth experienced its hottest year on record and massive floods, fires and other climate-related disasters have taken root and lack of action on climate change threatens billions of lives and livelihoods.
"Biological research aimed at preventing future pandemics has proven useful, but also presents the risk of causing one. And recent advances in artificial intelligence raise a variety of questions about how to control a technology that could improve or threaten civilisation in countless ways."
What makes 2025 particularly concerning is that none of these risks have improved - and risks like that of nuclear war have only worsened.
For now, we can only wait and see.
