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“It’s 85 seconds to midnight!” Alexandra Bell declared on January 27th, in the middle of the day.

She wasn’t trying to calibrate everyone’s watch to a revised Coordinated Universal Time. She was representing the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists forecasting the end of the world.

Since 1947, the world has looked to the Doomsday Clock as an indicator of how close the human race is to complete and utter annihilation. 

Now, before you write off the performative clock as a tradition as nonsensical as Punxsutawney Phil granting us six more weeks of winter, let’s pause and understand what the implications of the clock nearing midnight signals to us as leaders.

The Doomsday Clock can feel arbitrary, absurd even. But we should pay attention. Not to be cynical, but to pause and think. The movement of the Doomsday time is shaped by people who have spent their lives studying risk, many of them Nobel laureates. The “time” is thoroughly researched and calculated. And while it’s not prophecy, it’s also not noise.

Nearly 80 years ago, some of the world’s leading minds, including Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, gathered together to warn the world about existential threats, namely, at that moment in time, nuclear war. Each year, the clock’s time is assessed based on key factors including nuclear risk, climate change, disruptive technologies, and biological dangers.

The opening time was seven minutes to midnight. In 1953, that plummeted to only two minutes to midnight after successful hydrogen bomb tests were conducted by both the United States of America and the USSR. Iron Maiden famously released the song “Two Minutes to Midnight” (ironically in 1984), that was inspired by the Doomsday Clock’s lowest point, at that time. 

At our safest moment, we moved to 17 minutes until midnight in 1991. Progressively, in 2020 and beyond, we have inched closer and closer to where we are today: “It’s 85 seconds until midnight.”

The clock isn’t meant to be a true apocalyptic prediction, but rather a symbolic measure of how close experts believe humanity is to catastrophic self-destruction from human-made risks. That’s key. Human-made risks. Over the years, the Bulletin shifted from solely nuclear weaponry as a benchmark and incorporated other factors, including climate change, biological threats, disruptive technologies (like AI), and global leadership dynamics. 

The most interesting thing about this moment in history is not the invention of radically disruptive technologies like generative AI, nor the unsettled state of the global scene. Instead, it is a recurring pattern throughout human history that is hard to deny:

Power (Force or Knowledge) establishes Authority. Authority commands Control. Control evokes a sense of Transcendence, or god-likeness. And once an individual leader or society reaches that state, it ends in collapse.

Both lived history and global literature point to this cycle.

First, in literature, we see patterns of the pursuit of power. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the protagonist Gilgamesh searches for immortality and knowledge after coming face-to-face with death. In Greek mythology, Prometheus steals fire as a symbol of knowledge, power, and technology. Odin, one of the more recognized gods in the Norse tradition, sacrifices his eye to gain knowledge and wisdom. The Book of Enoch, an ancient Jewish text, outlines forbidden knowledge as a source of power that ultimately leads to corruption. In the Bible, the Tower of Babel represents humanity’s attempt to reach heaven and consolidate power and identity apart from divine limits.

This pattern has been the cycle of empires as well. Ancient empires from Egypt to Rome to China elevated knowledge (engineering, astronomy, administration, and so on) as a means of sustaining authority. And when empires grew too powerful or overstretched, others often swept in with force. Moving into the Enlightenment era, human reason was increasingly elevated as the primary source of authority, often minimizing the need for divine oversight. As knowledge expanded, the Scientific Revolution and Industrial Age illustrated how human understanding could be used to dominate nature.

But this isn’t limited to ancient history and older folklore and literature. Look at 1984. The central premise is that control of knowledge and truth equals power. Today, culture may be illustrating its most explicitly modern attempt to replicate creation, intelligence, and ultimately longevity. Biotechnological advances that alter the human genome, combined with machines that accelerate access to and control of knowledge, have brought humanity closer to transcendent aspirations than at any previous point in history.

Regardless of religious belief or one’s view of a higher power, the pattern is difficult to ignore.

Humans can now access virtually any information instantly. We are becoming, with the aid of our created machines, Omniscient. We can see almost everything in real time, nearing Omnipresence. We can speak to our AI and create images, videos, text, and even code by simply speaking (or typing a prompt). 

And to be clear: this isn’t an argument against science, medicine, or progress. There is nothing inherently wrong with innovation. Discovery and advancement are not the problem. The tension is how quickly our capabilities have expanded compared to our wisdom. More than that, the danger becomes what a human being actually has the capacity to know and see before they themselves collapse.

Here’s the paradox I keep coming back to: there is an existential risk in the world right now and we’re trying to solve it with the very risks we’ve created.

We believe more data will clarify meaning. But as we know, there are three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth. We’ve weaponized information to defend our side of the story using information and data to cut down viewpoints that oppose ours. 

We think more access will resolve confusion. That’s likely why nearly a third of Gen Z would be okay with government surveillance cameras inside private residences. But video footage and recordings don’t unify or resolve confusion; they split a nation. Look at Minnesota. Access created chaos, not clarity. 

We don’t yet understand the implications of our knowledge. Or how dangerous unanchored capability can be.

Being unanchored to a moral core, to a common truth, is what causes the pursuit of more to run unchecked. This Doomsday Clock is anchored back to 1947 and the atomic bomb.

The moment humanity created a force powerful enough to erase itself, we crossed a threshold. We proved we could build something we did not yet have the moral consensus to steward. That’s not a political statement. It’s a historical one. Sure, one could argue that any number of other earlier innovations were also as consequential. But the point is, we are “85 seconds to midnight.”

The Doomsday Clock emerged from that realization amongst some of the world’s brightest minds in the mid 20th century, that we had accelerated faster than our shared understanding of responsibility. Our moral compass was not universally aligned; it was fractured.

The pursuit of power, in this case by both knowledge/innovation and force, established authority amongst those holding the nuclear power. That authority demanded control. That control created a feeling of transcendence. Invincibility. Ultimate power.

And that pattern has repeated itself ever since. Today, we are engineering biology, manipulating life, redefining boundaries that once felt fixed, creating systems that generate information faster than humans can interpret it, unlocking portals into viewing events that allow each viewer to be the judge, jury, and executioner.  

In our relentless pursuit of knowledge, we’ve assumed that more information automatically leads to more wisdom. History suggests otherwise. The ancient warning, across religious, philosophical, and anthropological traditions, isn’t that knowledge is bad. It’s that knowledge without wisdom is dangerous.

And increasingly, we’re asking technology and algorithms to help us determine what’s true, what’s good, and what matters most. That should give us pause.

So yes, in many respects, I view the Doomsday Clock time as a ceremonial prediction. Classier and more sophisticated than the Gobbler’s Knob ritual of a groundhog and its shadow, but performative nonetheless. 

At the same time, as leaders, we must pause to understand the true implications of our pursuits. We need to see the patterns and realize that our pursuits are at a unique climax. Technology is moving faster than ever, and here is the kicker. It is not a kingdom nor nation or people group that has unfettered access to the knowledge. It is every individual. And when such coveted power can be accessed by each individual from the 6.7 inch screen in our pockets, we must stop to consider the implications. 

As King Solomon quipped, “there’s nothing new under the sun.” The human quest for something more is undeniable. It’s not new. But it has reached new heights.