Wake up babe! A new forecast for the annihilation of Earth just dropped. On January 28, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists released its latest update on the Doomsday Clock – a measure of existential threats to humanity and the planet, where midnight signals the apocalypse. This year, it’s set at 89 seconds to midnight, which is the closest it’s ever been.

According to Daniel Holz, chair of the Bulletin’s science and security board, the factors shaping this year’s decision were “not new” – as in previous years, they include nuclear risk, climate change, the “potential misuse of advances in biological science”, and other emerging tech like AI. “But we have seen insufficient progress in addressing the key challenges,” he adds, “and in many cases this is leading to increasingly negative and worrisome effects.”

More specifically, the latest Doomsday Clock statement points to ongoing violence in Ukraine and the Middle East as potential trigger points for nuclear conflict, while military applications for AI “raise questions about the extent to which machines will be allowed to make military decisions – even decisions that could kill on a vast scale”.

AI is also driving widespread propaganda and misinformation, the statement adds, which only exacerbates other risks like emerging diseases, or even the development of novel biological weapons. As usual, climate change also figures into the Doomsday predictions, following a year of record temperatures and extreme weather events.

There is some good news to be taken away from the update. While it might feel like the world is rapidly spiralling out of control, the Doomsday Clock has only actually ticked one second closer to midnight, compared with 2023 and 2024, when it was set at 90 seconds to midnight. Obviously, this is still much closer than we’d like it to be, but it offers some hope that we can slow down (or ideally reverse) our slide into extinction before it’s too late.

Even so, hitting 89 seconds to midnight should serve as a clear reminder of our current situation, says the Bulletin. “In setting the Clock one second closer to midnight, we send a stark signal: because the world is already perilously close to the precipice, a move of even a single second should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster.”