Tuesday 15 March 2022

minutes to midnight

Via Open Culture, we learn about the history of the Doomsday Clock, first presented as symbolic representation of the likelihood of a human-created global catastrophe to the public nearly seventy-five years ago, starting at a comfortable buffer time of 23:53 but now wound up to a hundred seconds before the eve of destruction and seen its hands adjusted back and forth twenty-four times during the course of world events since 1947. A group of scientist who had contributed to the Szilรกrd petition and subsequent Manhattan Project began circulating a newsletter following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to encourage restraint and never again seek recourse to nuclear weapons with a clock to represent the countdown to the inevitable outcomes should we stay this course and not make a decision to turn back the hands.