It's been called a global alarm clock, and for 77 years now, it's been ticking like a time bomb. Its hands have been set and reset more than 25 times, sometimes backwards, but too often they creep ever forward to oblivion. How close is that clock to going off now?
That’s the question posed every year by the keepers of the Doomsday Clock. It isn't an actual clock, but the time bomb it's wired to — the Earth and everyone on it — is all too real. And according to the clock keepers, it's close to exploding.
If that all sounds overly dramatic, well, it's meant to be. That's because the Doomsday Clock is an urgent warning to humanity, a metaphorical yet nevertheless ominous countdown to existential midnight, the end of the world as we know it.
Who Created the Doomsday Clock?
Einstein and Oppenheimer (Courtesy U.S. Government Defense Threat Reduction Agency/Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons)
