Breaking news: The doomsday clock has just been set even closer to two minutes before midnight. But am I the only one who finds it hard to believe that we're now as close to the brink of complete destruction as we were during the heights of the cold war? One might get the impression that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists suffers from a lack of attention nowadays. It actually makes me wonder why we shouldn't equip EVERY country on earth with a vast array of nuclear weapons. Surely, that would set the doomsday clock to, like, five minutes AFTER midnight and give us finally some time to sort out our problems.
OK, cast my cynicism aside, but if you take a look at the historical reasons why the doomsday clock was moved, you'll notice that 2007 was the last time the clock was moved forward as a result of the global situation actually worsening, when North Korea became a nuclear player. After that, the clock was only set forward because the situation "didn't get better" [1].
Speaking of North Korea, they are, as odd as it sounds, the country that is currently the most likely to actually start a nuclear war. For all other countries, Mutually Assured Destruction has effectively prevented a nuclear war, but Kim Jong-un is insane, so nuclear deterrence does not work on him. Now before you start writing "But Trump is insane too" in the comments: no, he is not. You can say a lot of bad things about Trump, but you can't say that he lost his mind. In fact, he is very sane, and very self-interested. He has as much to lose from a nuclear war as everybody else, or do you believe that he would risk Trump Tower to become the target of a nuclear missile?
So one of the main reasons why the doomsday clock was set forward this time was Trump and Kim Jong-un comparing the size of their...buttons. And it is in fact reassuring to know that Trump has the bigger one. One might say that Trump does not have to drop his pants to let Kim Jong-un know that he has the bigger...button. So if someone actually presses that button, it would be Kim Jong-un, in which case North Korea would be annihilated and that would be the end of the story.
The reason why the doomsday clock is set so low actually began in 2007, when global warming was added as a doomsday scenario which, objectively, it isn't. Even the IPCC's worst case scenarios on climate change don't spell the end of the human race. Not even remotely! This is not to say that climate change doesn't have dreadful consequences, but as long as we measure the result of climate change in economic outcomes [2] and not in loss of population percentages, humanity is doing fine.
But this move in 2007 allowed the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to shift the goalposts from "We're absolutely fucked" to "We're relatively fucked". And when in human development have we been not relatively fucked? Now if you know a bit or two about human development, then you would expect humanity to be less relatively fucked the longer you let this development continue. Famines, poverty, wars, pollution, taxation, disasters, crime, just about any kind of human tragedy, we are actually sorting out these problems. Well, maybe with the exception of taxation. This shit will stick around for a long time if we don't proactively fight it.
But of course, acknowledging the advances we have made over the last decades would leave the Bulletin without a raison d'être. They made themselves completely ridiculous in 2017 when they added Trumpism to their list of "existential threats to humanity" and I expect more to come. So if next year they set their doomsday clock to one minute and forty seconds to midnight, my advice to you is: don't panic, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, buy Litecoins, remember that taxation is theft, and try to live together in harmony with people of all creeds and nations. All is right with the world.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock
[2] https://cleantechnica.com/2017/03/02/study-ipccs-worst-case-climate-change-scenario-leads-40-billion-year-losses-european-coastal-cities-2100/