Doomsday Clock Closer To Midnight Than Ever Before, But Do We Really Care?

In case you hadn't heard, and not that you didn't already suspect it, human beings are closer to wiping themselves off the face of the Earth and out of existence altogether than ever before.

That's the official prognosis at least from the eggheads at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists who operate what they call the Doomsday Clock.

According to the Bulletin, the Clock is a symbol that represents the estimated likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe based on the current state of the world and a litany of other assorted variables.

The Clock has been maintained since 1947 and is a metaphor, not a running prediction, which quantifies a variety of threats to humanity's continuation from unchecked scientific and technological advances.

The position of the clock is not an indicator of actual time (not that there is such a thing anyway), but rather a marker for how close humanity is to a global apocalypse - with midnight representing the cuckooing crescendo of its invisible fuse.

The clockmakers at the Bulletin assess the state of the world based on their litmuses for total destruction every time we make it to another January without annihilating ourselves and move the hands of the device accordingly, by virtue of developments over the previous year which cause them to either be turned back or pushed ahead. Think of it like an exercise in the annual switch to Daylight Saving Time using the likelihood of detonating nukes and global-killing asteroids instead of saving electricity and being late for work as the reasons for doing so.

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The primary factors that influence the Clock are things like nuclear war, climate change, and artificial intelligence (A.I.), but there are other items which can also make its tick speed up or slow down annually. And while it's unknown if zombies are among them, it wouldn't be a surprise to me, since Las Vegas and WalMart continue to bear out the validity of their existence on a daily basis.

The Clock was originally set at seven minutes to midnight when it was emblematically plugged in 77 years ago, and has been moved backwards eight times and forward 18 times since then.

Oddly enough, the furthest it has ever been from the cataclysmic chime of midnight was in the year I graduated from high school, 1991, when it was 17 minutes away. This shift was largely thanks to the fall of the Soviet Union and the perceivable end to that radioactive pissing contest we once called the Arms Race. Now, some 34 years after I donned a trencher and tassel to celebrate my separation from forceable institutionalization by the state, the Clock sits a mere 89 seconds away from its most-perilous peal - which is the closest it has ever been.

The brainiac timekeepers at the Bulletin note the rising hazards posed by A.I., the continuing instability of global governments, and dangerous spikes in global warming and irrevocable environmental damage as the main reasons for 2025's move of the Clock to near-checkmate status. And they further warn than with its representative hands now sitting so precariously close to the precipice of armageddon, even one false move on the part of humanity could force the Clock to suddenly jump to its end time and turn every human being into a pumpkin who is all-too ripe for an indelible squashing.

To some degree, I personally feel the Doomsday Clock is a construct of complete futility. Surely we all must know, even in some subconscious way beneath the many layers of Twisted Tea and K-Y Jelly we insist on remaining perpetually obscured within, that our time has been running its course ever since we showed up on this rock, and therefore will undeniably be running out until it eventually does.

The overtures of repeatedly reversing and advancing the theoretical rate at which we will come to know this most certain fate might seem like a clever exercise in gauging our collective ability to achieve immortality, but in the end are no different than dying our already silvering hair a shade away from jet black or getting Botox injected beneath the furrowed skin atop our omni-scowling brow, it's only delaying the inevitable and lining us with a candy coating of artificial hubris when humility is always just below the surface, no matter how old or far gone we might be considered.

But while on the one hand I do feel like the Doomsday Clock is similar to a Rolex with a afterlifetime warranty of no real use or value, on the other I also think it can be used as a catalyst for the contemplation of something much greater. Even if our corporealism-in-arms is at the mercy of one clock or another of sorts, our spirits are nothing less than blinding rays of boundless origin and potentiality which are transcendent of any and all states and realities that are possible. For it is up to us, both as innate pieces of a never-ending Universe who've been gifted with a belonging to both the notion of individuality and a family of flesh-bound experiencers, to decide how we want to shape both our present and our future, while using our past to help us in doing so.

Although I'm not honestly troubled by the thought of humankind running its course via one striking of a midnight oblivion or another, and therefore don't see this clock that's being kept by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists as having anything to do with the "doom" that's found in its namesake, there's still no doubt that humanity's time as a physical extension of subsistence is inherently limited to one degree or another. After all, that's part of any handshake with the material plane. But just as certain as I am of this fact being unwaveringly true, I am even more resolute in the knowledge that the energies which makeup all of the things we call things within this reality, including the ones we know as ourselves, will go on and on and are forever free to become and go over and over again without the slightest inclination of an ensuing conclusion.

As the ultimate dictators of how we make our way to the knelling of this midnight, it is Cosmically incumbent upon us to make every effort to see to it that this journey to zero-hundred hours is filled with only the best that we are capable of. Love; compassion; mindfulness, and so on. Because it is through the expressions of these virtuous blessings that we are truly able to live and shine on like an undying star for all eternity, no matter what form the energies that shape us should take.