End Times
Is This the End?
As the clock ticks toward the end times, it’s easy to lose faith in humanity’s ability to endure. But we can’t give up.
Asteroids, supervolcanoes, nuclear war, climate change, engineered viruses, artificial intelligence, and even aliens — the end may be closer than you think. This is the last in a series of essays drawn from editor Bryan Walsh’s new book End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World, which hits shelves on August 27 and is available for order now. We’re not helpless. It’s up to us to postpone the apocalypse.
On January 24, 2019, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — a journal that has tracked the threat of human-made apocalypse since the dawn of the nuclear age — announced the new setting of its Doomsday Clock. It was two minutes to midnight — the same as the year before, tied for the latest since the Clock began keeping time. In keeping the Clock unchanged, the Bulletin made the only decision it could. The world hadn’t gotten perceptibly worse over the course of 2018; there were even some improvements, but on balance it hadn’t gotten any better, either.
The Bulletin had an apt term for the state we now find ourselves in, circling the drain of Armageddon: a “new abnormal,” as the physicist Robert Rosner put it the day of…
