Tick tick boom?
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its Doomsday Clock forward for 2026, announcing that it is now set to 85 seconds to midnight –— the closest it’s ever been to catastrophe in its 79-year history.
“It is the determination of the bulletin’s science and security board that humanity has not made sufficient progress on the existential risks that endanger us all. We thus move the clock forward,” the organization’s CEO, Alexandra Bell, announced on Tuesday.
Steve Fetter, a member of org’s Science and Security Board told The Post that their decision “reflects the increased risk of catastrophe resulting from current trends,” including the looming threat of nuclear war, disease, and the rise of AI.
Founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later as a metaphor for how close humanity is to destroying itself.
In 1947, the Doomsday Clock was set at 7 minutes to midnight.
Last year, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set the clock at 89 seconds to midnight — meaning we’ve jumped forward 4 seconds in the past 12 months.
However, the clock wasn’t devised as a game clock for armageddon, but rather a motivational tool aimed at inspiring us to resolve “the world’s most urgent, man-made existential threats.”
Nonetheless, if this alarming clock is to be believed, our darkest hour could be at hand, per the Bulletin.
They cited a “failure of leadership” worldwide as the reason why Doomsday ticked closer to Midnight.
“Major countries became even more aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic,” lamented Daniel Holtz, a Bulletin member and physics professor at the University Of Chicago, during the conference. “Conflicts intensified in 2025 with multiple military operations involving nuclear-armed states.”
These tensions ramped up over the summer when nuclear powers Pakistan and India border engaged in border skirmishes and escalated threats of full-scale war.
Meanwhile, earlier this month, Russia fired a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile at Ukraine in a retaliatory strike for an alleged attack on an official residence of President Vladimir Putin.
Holtz bemoaned the fact that the New START Treaty, which restricts nations’ strategic nuclear arsenals, is slated to expire on Feb. 5.
“For the first time in over half a century, there will be nothing preventing a runaway nuclear arms race,” he rued.
And nuclear war isn’t the only existential threat facing humanity, according to this league of doomsdayers.
During the conference, journalist and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Maria Pressa also warned about the rise of “generative AI, which she said accelerated “global chaos” by disseminating “floods of synthetic disinformation” at “near zero cost.”
She spoke of “AI slop victimizing millions in scams” and “supercharging the dysfunction in our information ecosystem.”
Along with allowing fake news to proliferate, the tech could even be used to engineer deadly diseases.
“One clear risk is the use of AI to design novel pathogens—particularly pathogens that don’t exist in nature and for which no countermeasures exist,” Fetter told the Post. “There also are risks associated with incorporating AI into military systems, particularly if AI is used to make lethal decisions or humans come to rely on AI for such decisions.”
In their new book “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All,” computer scientists Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares warned that the human race will be annihilated by synthetic viruses and other means if we don’t hit the kill switch.
Fortunately, the Bulletin members claim that humanity can wind back the clock on the apocalypse.
“It [The Doomsday Clock] is ticking, but it can be turned back,” Pressa declared. “Now is the time to act. We need technology platforms redesigned around human rights, not engagement metrics. We need AI governance that prioritizes safety over speed.”
“Information integrity is the mother of all battles because you can’t run democracy on a corrupted operating system,” she added. “You can’t turn back the doomsday clock when half the world doesn’t believe these problems even exist.”
