Hi, I’m Kara McGuirk-Allison, editor of More To The Story.
I don’t remember exactly where I first heard about the Doomsday Clock. But I’m pretty sure it was either from Doctor Who or Watchmen. The clock has been a symbolic plot device foreshadowing our own destruction of humankind since its creation in 1947. But the clock, and everything it stands for, is very real.
More recently, maybe you saw the movie Oppenheimer. Well, creating the atomic bomb scared those scientists right out of their lab coats. So the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock and set it to 7 minutes before midnight. And to give you some context, earlier this year, its experts moved the clock’s hands to 85 seconds before midnight, the closest they’ve ever been to pointing at imminent destruction.
Our guest on this week’s More To The Story is Daniel Holz, professor of physics, researcher of black holes, and chair of the decision-making group that turns those metaphoric hands of doom. And while threats like nuclear weapons, AI, disinformation, and climate change all affected the decision to shift the clock’s hands, Daniel says the clock is actually a symbol of hope that citizens of the world will acknowledge our circumstances and do the right things to turn those hands back—together.
—Kara McGuirk-Allison
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