It was a possibility too significant to ignore. In 1939, world-renowned scientists Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard wrote to the US president about a breakthrough in nuclear technology that was so powerful, and could have such tremendous battlefield consequences, that a single nuclear bomb, "carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port". The speed and violence with which nuclear technology evolved was breathtaking, even to those closely involved in its development. But to understand what that really means, you need to understand the story of the Clock, where it came from, how to read it, and what it tells us about humanity's existential predicament. And in 2020, the Bulletin's president, Rachel Bronson, solemnly announced that its hands had moved closer to armageddon than ever before – only 100 seconds (it has remained at that position in 20 only to move 10 seconds closer in 2023). On each occassion, the announcement highlights the complex web of catastrophic risks facing humanity, including weapons of mass destruction, environmental breakdown and disruptive technologies. In January 2022, they did it for the 75th time. "In this time of unprecedented global danger, concerted action is required, and every second counts," said the Bulletin.Įvery year, the scientists responsible for the Doomsday Clock at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists publish their annual judgement of how close its hands sit to midnight. The lingering threat posed by Covid-19 also highlighted just how vulnerable the world still is to new and emerging diseases, alongside the spectre of biological weapons in the conflict in Ukraine. It also warned that there were signs the war could even spill over into space for the first time. The geopolitical division the war has created is having knock-on effects elsewhere too, such as hampering global efforts to tackle climate change, the Bulletin said. It said the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine and the wider threat to security it posed, including Russia's "veiled threats" to use nuclear weapons, were primarily why the clock had ticked forward. We live in a "time of unprecedented danger", the Bulletin said in the statement released to announce the moving of the clock hands. At 90 seconds to midnight, it is the nearest the world has been to disaster in the 76 years that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has released annual assessments. However, that's not quite accurate.Īfter spending three years set at 100 seconds to midnight, the hands of the Doomsday Clock ticked 10 seconds closer to global catastrophe in 2023. It's a powerful story, and for many years I thought this is what the Doomsday Clock meant: that its hands represented the time we have left before the end. It never crossed my mind that someday I might be working on the same problem, as a researcher at the Centre of the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. Then she contrasted this great swathe of history with how short our futures might be, and told us how a group of scientists in the US thought we may only have a few metaphorical minutes left until midnight. She told my class about the grand sweep of history, explaining that if everything that had happened on our planet was compressed into a single year, then life would have emerged in early March, multi-cellular organisms in November, dinosaurs in late-December – and humans wouldn't arrive on the scene until 23:30 on New Year’s Eve. That requires the current instant.I first became aware of the Doomsday Clock at school in the mid-1990s when a teacher introduced it to me. This can simplify testing.īest practice for applications is to pass a Clock into any method Applications use an object to obtain theĬurrent time rather than a static method. The primary purpose of this abstraction is to allow alternate clocks to be Now() factory method that uses the system clock in the default time zone. Interpreted using the stored time-zone to find the current date and time.Īs such, a clock can be used instead of System.currentTimeMillis() Instances of this class are used to find the current instant, which can be A clock providing access to the current instant, date and time using a time-zone.
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