More than 100 seconds before the apocalypse, estimates a group of scientists. This group meets every year to fix the clock of the apocalypse, imagined in 1947 to symbolize the imminence of a planetary cataclysm. This year, global conflicts and global warming have cost humanity 20 seconds.
"We are now expressing the time between the world and the disaster in seconds, not hours or minutes," said Rachel Bronson, president and CEO of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, at a press conference in Washington, as every year in January. Last year, the clock indicated midnight minus 2. The hand was therefore advanced by 20 seconds.
Iranian nuclear worries experts
A group of experts, including 13 Nobel Prize winners, sets the new time each year. Originally, after the Second World War, the clock indicated midnight minus 7. In 1991, at the end of the Cold War, it had gone back up to 17 minutes before midnight. In 1953, as well as in 2018 and 2019, it displayed midnight minus 2.
On the nuclear front, scientists have noted the dismantling of the international arms control base, with the withdrawal of the United States and Russia from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Weapons Treaty (INF) in 2019. The United States of Donald Trump threatens not to renew the New Start treaty on strategic nuclear weapons, concluded in 2010, after its expiration in 2021.
"This year, we may be witnessing events other than the total collapse of the Iranian nuclear deal," said expert Sharon Squassoni. As for North Korea, Donald Trump's direct approach to Kim Jong-un has yet to bear fruit, she said.
Fake news, AI and space
On the climate, experts pointed to the disappointment of two major summits devoted to the climate, which did not generate the necessary commitments from the major polluting countries to reverse the curve of greenhouse gas emissions. 2019 was the second hottest year on record, after 2016, and climate change was illustrated with heat records, the melting of the Arctic and exceptional fires in Australia.
"If humanity is pushing the climate into the opposite of an ice age, we have no reason to believe that such a world would remain hospitable to human civilization," said Sivan Kartha, scientist at the Stockholm Environmental Institute .
The group also blamed other catalysts for societal disintegration such as disinformation campaigns and "deepfakes" videos, as well as the emergence of weapons based on artificial intelligence, such as drones capable of killing without human supervision. Not to mention the new militarization of space. "We call on world leaders to keep mankind away from the precipice," said Mary Robinson, president of the Elders group and former Irish president. "The time has come to come together and act."
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- Apocalypse
- Nuclear
- Global warming
- Society