The end is nigh, says the Doomsday Clock. But it’s out of sync

Well, the end is nigh. This week, the Doomsday Clock ticked forward to two minutes to midnight, a desperate 120 seconds from apocalypse. So spend these moments with your loved ones. Or step back and check your own wristwatch.

Since 1947, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has deployed the clock as a sobering exercise in geopolitical time-management, a watch-tapping Banquo to disturb the feast. But it’s been 65 years since we were last at this dread time – in 1953, when the Russians and Americans were petrifying the world with hydrogen bomb tests. Since then, it has marked those white-knuckle, child-hugging weeks of 1962, and indeed the terrifying brush with annihilation in the false alarm of 1983.

But its rhetorical force is not what it used to be. Now the factors that go into calculating the Doomsday Clock, alongside nuclear destruction, include “energy”, “diplomacy” and “climate science”. It is by no means obvious that these timelines are in sync, nor even that they must tick forward. These days, it is not at all glib to say that, given its postwar CV, the nuclear bomb deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. What can we learn, in any case, from a clock that began “ticking” at seven minutes to midnight and has never shown a time before 11.43pm – which has never allowed the possibility that humankind might not be in the last 1.2 per cent of its existence?

Meanwhile, in a perverse irony, it emerged within the same 24 hours that palaeontologists have found that Homo sapiens has 100,000 further years of history to his credit than we suspected. In a flash, the current lifespan of the species increased by 50 per cent.

It is time up for the Doomsday Clock; we would do better to focus on forms of time that matter. Yes, public time is objectively maintained for all to see: it structures our days, our calendar and our shared sense of history. Yet cultures find different ways to measure it. For most ancients, the day began at sunrise; the Islamic day begins at sunset, as it once did for the Italians. “Hours” waxed and waned with the seasons. A “week” has ranged from five days in Korea to a sprawling 13 for the Aztecs. For some, years are irrelevant: astronomers count days in sequence from January 1 4713BC, the Julian Day.

However, it is two other time schemes that really impinge on individual human lives: the private body clock, both in its diurnal circadian rhythms and the inexorable process of ageing, and the mind-bendingly curious phenomenon of psychological time. Who cares what public time has passed when a three-hour film seems to pass in a moment, or a brief embrace to last an age? What does the official age of death matter when one person’s 90 years are experienced so differently from anyone else’s?

Of course, we must be informed by the past: museums are invaluable prisms – and prisons – of time. So, too, should we be conscious of protecting our future. But objective time (however fabricated) should know its place: to mark change, and not demand it.