While listening to an interview with the President of the Doomsday Clock recently, I was alarmed to learn that, as of January 2020, humanity was officially placed at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest we have ever been to existential catastrophe.

At first this struck me as faintly ridiculous given some of the nuclear near-misses humanity endured at the height of the Cold War. While I was willing to acknowledge that things were not great right now, were we really closer to the brink of destruction today than we were in October 1962?

Then, about 24 hours after hearing the conversation, I experienced my COVID-19 ‘moment’, and my calculus of risk shifted (to borrow an unfashionable Blairism).

As a good friend of mine remarked at the weekend, “Everyone is on broadly the same COVID-19 journey, but people are getting there in their own time.” Judging by the crowds out and about in public on Mother’s Day, this seems like an astute observation. Not everyone has had their own moment yet. To many, the virus is not just invisible but unreal, or at least, beyond their comprehension. It’s still being interpreted as the sort of terrible situation that happens to other people, not all of us.

Since experiencing my own moment of realisation, I’ve been reading the headlines and observing the press conferences through the lens of the Doomsday Clock. The current pandemic is unlikely to sound the death knell for humanity (although the damage may take years to recover from) but it does seem to be highlighting how ill-prepared we all are for a crisis scenario. We seem too slow to respond, too disconnected, too unwilling to compromise and too hesitant to take drastic action at critical moments.

After all, what if the next pandemic is three times as deadly? What if, rather than teaching us valuable lessons in risk mitigation, the economic, governmental and societal damage caused by COVID-19 serves only to make us weaker, more disconnected and more vulnerable to whatever the next threat might be?

I’ve heard it said that human ingenuity and technological innovation represent the best hope of finding a solution to climate change. Perhaps we need a little bit more innovation and ingenuity across the board to pull us back from the precipice. Because, all told, living at 100 seconds to midnight isn’t conducive to a happy or healthy society.

Photo credit: Thomas Bormans