Is the doom clock right this time? Probably best not to think about it

We are at the most estimated six-year winter? dangerous point in Some evolutionary scientists recent history, believe early humans were apparently. This is the almost wiped out by this suggestion made by the catastrophe, with the global international panel of population reduced to scientists which periodically roughly a thousand resets the world’s Doomsday “breeding pairs”. How about Clock. The Bulletin of that for danger? Atomic Scientists – which I realise this smacks of created the clock back in desperation – rummaging 1947, as a visually-arresting through history’s unlucky way to signal the threat of dip for a counter-argument. nuclear conflict – has It’s just so hard to believe, in nudged the hands forward one’s bones, that the end to 90 seconds to midnight. might be nigh. Even now,

It is the closest the clock after more than a decade of has ever come to the hour of one-thing-after-other, the doom. idea of nuclear war feels

During the Cuban missile implausibly dramatic. crisis, the hands remained at Perhaps this is how it seven minutes to midnight, always feels, on the cusp of because Washington and calamity. Life is just normal Moscow were clearly willing enough to lull you into and able to negotiate. Not so complacency. The sun now. “We are living in a time comes up, the earth gives off of unprecedented danger,” its damp morning smell, the says the Bulletin. Russia’s cat stretches, your stomach unprovoked invasion of rumbles. You don’t realise Ukraine has undermined history is upon you, until it’s international codes of too late. conduct, created a war zone in the vicinity of two nuclear Animals may

 power plants, and led to understand more about thinly veiled threats of humans than we ever nuclear strikes. “Escalation imagined. A new study has of the conflict – by accident, found that humans, intention or miscalculation chimpanzees and bonobos – is a terrible risk.” all share a common ape

Although (or perhaps language of gestures (such because) I have absolutely as the flick of the wrist that no expertise in the fields of indicates “go away”). atomic science or geopolitics, Dogs, meanwhile, may I read this report possess the “theory of mind” with knee-jerk scepticism. that enables us to imagine Yes, okay, everything is what other people may be terrible right now. And thinking. Researchers at perhaps it is the worst since Vienna University have the clock was devised. But found dogs can discern could anyone suggest this is whether a human failed to a uniquely perilous moment? pass them a treat out of More dangerous than, say, meanness or clumsiness. September 1939, when the They are quick to forgive deadliest war in history clumsiness but will punish began? Or October 1347, meanness with a cold when rats infected with shoulder. bubonic plague scampered Humans love studying off a merchant ship in Sicily, animals. But what if, all this starting a pandemic that time, they have been quietly would eventually kill a third scrutinising us? One dreads of Europe’s population? to think what they say about

Or what about the us behind closed doors. super-volcano that erupted in Indonesia 74,000 years ago, ejecting so much ash, debris and vapour into the atmosphere that it blotted out the sun and plunged much of the world into an