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On a warm day in mid-July, some 80 scientists comprised of Nobel laureates and nuclear security experts gathered in a 10th-floor conference room at the University of Chicago. They were then asked to imagine their own deaths…
A presenter guided the group’s attention out of the window, past the gothic spires of campus, and traced which neighborhoods could vanish from differently sized nuclear blasts. The exercise, recently chronicled in Popular Mechanics, is part of the process behind one of the most recognizable symbols on Earth: the Doomsday Clock.
When artist Martyl Langsdorf drew it for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ first magazine cover in 1947, she set the hand at seven minutes to midnight for no scientific reason at all… the placement simply “suited my eye.” The hand has always been a judgment call.
This past January, the Bulletin’s board moved it to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest in its history, citing nuclear arsenals, climate, and the unchecked rise of unregulated artificial intelligence.
