89 Straight To The Point Posts That Call Out The World We're Living In

In case you thought you needed another source of anxiety, this week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight.

The clock is a symbolic representation of how close humanity is to destroying the world. And midnight itself represents the moment when people will have made our planet uninhabitable, CNN reports.

This is the closest to midnight that the clock has ever been since being established back in 1947.

In 2025, the Doomsday Clock was set at 89 seconds to midnight. It was set at 90 seconds to midnight in 2023 and 2024. Meanwhile, this year, in 2026, scientists believe that not enough progress has been made in fighting global challenges like nuclear risk, the climate crisis, biological threats, and the advances in disruptive tech, like artificial intelligence.

Other existential threats to humanity include things like the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories.

“Humanity has not made sufficient progress on the existential risks that endanger us all. The Doomsday Clock is a tool for communicating how close we are to destroying the world with technologies of our own making. The risks we face from nuclear weapons, climate change and disruptive technologies are all growing. Every second counts and we are running out of time. It is a hard truth, but this is our reality,” said Alexandra Bell, president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Meanwhile, Dr. Daniel Holz, the chair of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ science and security board, said that instead of heeding this warning, major countries became “even more aggressive, adversarial and nationalistic.”

Holz added: “Grave dangers persist in the life sciences, particularly in emerging areas such as the development of synthetic mirror life, despite repeated warnings from scientists worldwide. The international community has no coordinated plan, and the world remains unprepared for potentially devastating biological threats.”

That being said, it’s important to remember that the Doomsday Clock is meant to spark conversations about crises and threats. It isn’t designed to accurately measure them, however.

Back in 2022, Dr. Michael Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor in the department of Earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania, told CNN that the clock is “an imperfect metaphor.” And yet, it is still “an important rhetorical device that reminds us, year after year, of the tenuousness of our current existence on this planet.”

Meanwhile, Dario Amodei, the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, which created the chatbot Claude, warns that humanity is entering a “turbulent and inevitable” phase of AI development that will “test who we are as a species.”

In a 19k-word essay, ‘The adolescence of technology,’ he urged the world to “wake up” to the risks, The Guardian reports.

“Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it,” Amodei, one of the most prominent voices for online safety when it comes to unrestrained AI development, warned.

According to him, the world is “considerably closer to real danger” in 2026 than in 2023

“If the exponential continues – which is not certain, but now has a decade-long track record supporting it – then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything.”