100 seconds to midnight: Why we’re closer to Doomsday than ever

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a non-profit group dedicated to monitoring the potential for global catastrophe, last night set the Doomsday Clock forward. We’re now 100 seconds away from midnight. As Douglas Adams was fond of writing: don’t panic. This doesn’t literally mean we’ll all be dead in the next minute-and-a-half. As the Bulletin puts it: The Doomsday Clock is a design that warns the public about how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous techno