Humanity Is Doing Its Best Impression of a Black Hole

In the universe, there is no greater catastrophe than a black hole , whose gravity is so intense that not even light can escape. Sure, a supernova is unbelievably violent, but the destruction wrought by a black hole is complete. These monsters wander around space like Pac-Man, gobbling up stars, planets, and asteroids, ripping them apart.

No human-made disaster—climate change, hunger, nuclear war—can rival such total destruction, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that we’re trying our damnedest. “I contemplate stuff at the very edge of the universe, things that are happening shortly after the Big Bang,” says Daniel Holz, a physicist at the University of Chicago. “We build these phenomenal instruments, these space telescopes, which peer back to the very beginning.

It’s incredible. And yet, we’re on the verge of totally wrecking our only home. ” Holz is a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , a nonprofit born of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings during World War II.

Its goal is to assess existential threats to our species, be they nuclear weapons or climate change , and to that end it sets the time on the Doomsday Clock, which turned 75 this year . The clock is a visual representation of how far the Bulletin’s scientists reckon humanity is from oblivion—the closer to midnight, the closer to planetary destruction. The clock now sits at 100 seconds to midnight, up from two minutes in 2018.

Tick tock, tick tock . There’s a peculiar beauty, though, in peering into the cosmos and contemplating our own insignificance. So WIRED sat down with Holz to talk about cosmic versus earthly catastrophes, how to cope with doom, and why this is a uniquely perilous time in human history—but also why all is not lost.

The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. WIRED: For those who aren’t familiar, what’s the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and what’s the Doomsday Clock? Daniel Holz: It was founded in 1947. They realized even then there will be an arms race, there will be H-bombs, there’ll be thousands of them.

The entire planet will be under threat. There will be no way to win these wars, there will be no way to defend against these weapons. We need to have a new way of thinking.

The scientists understood the technology, understood the threat, and felt like something had to be done. The Doomsday Clock is our way of symbolizing how we are doing globally. How are we responding to the existing threats, as we understand them? I would claim the biggest threat is obviously nuclear, and also it’s climate, and you could argue disinformation.

Bulletin members are people who are not hysterical. These are mostly scientists. These are very calm, rational, sober-minded people.

None of us are in this because we’re excited to move the clock towards midnight. The whole goal is to move away . Our fondest dream, the reason all of us are doing this, is to get to a point where we’re so far from midnight that no one cares.

If I could spend all my time on black holes and not worry about the future of civilization, that would be way better, without a doubt. One of my ways of coping with the chaos around us is to think: Well, in the grand sweep of the universe, we’re insignificant. But you can’t just put your head in the sand and expect the chaos to go away.

You need to care about what’s going on. We are beyond insignificant. The planet’s insignificant.

The solar system, the galaxy—just a tiny little speck in the bigger universe. We blow ourselves up, our planet, we make it completely unlivable and civilization collapses—it’s just a blip. It’s a tiny little part in this kind of boring part of the universe.

And the universe has been around for 14 billion years. Civilization, it’s what, 10,000 years? There are times when it really calms me down, actually. It’s reassuring to just think, “It’s OK, it’s fine.

The universe is going to go on. ” There’s almost certainly life on other planets. As we learn more and more about the universe, we learn more and more how we’re just not special.

There is no guarantee that we still will be around in 50 years or 100 years or whatever. The only determinant is ourselves, and the universe couldn’t care less. It’s on us.

But our planet is special—at least in our solar system, in our tiny corner of the universe—because it supports life. We’ve been gifted this incredible planet, which we’re trashing. That makes it all the more frustrating to hear about people wanting to move humans to Mars.

A lot of things have gone right for us to be here at this moment. And Mars just shows a deep misunderstanding of how all of this stuff works, and the countless things that make Earth perfect for human life. It’s also just completely unrealistic—it’s science fiction.

The time scales that we’re talking about, it’s not going to save us. You’re probably familiar with the Fermi paradox . [When contemplating why a galaxy that could theoretically support many life-forms has never showed signs of any others, physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked, “Where is everybody?”] The easiest answer to where all the alien civilizations are is that they blew themselves up.

If you look at the last 50 years, there’s lots of times where we’ve come very close to blowing ourselves up. And it’s only 50 years . How many more opportunities are we going to have to blow ourselves up in the coming 50 years? Just look at the last months .

Look at the rhetoric. What’s the chance that we’re going to make it through the next 20 years? You have all the nuclear weapons , all the conflicts. But now you have environmental disaster , you have food insecurity , you have wars over water, you have flooding , mass migration, people being displaced, refugee crises—all this on a scale that dwarfs anything the world has experienced so far.

Or, it could just be that the universe is too big and it’s too hard to get complex life, and that the odds are low enough that it just hasn’t happened in our galaxy. I find that harder to believe, but who knows? Reasonable people can disagree. The one thing that all human civilizations have in common is that they end.

For 10,000 years or so, that’s been the common factor. You can make an argument that civilizations tend not to last very long once they get to a certain level of tech. When they get to the point where they would be able to send probes out across the galaxy, or communicate at the speed of light, they don’t last long in that stage.

You’ve made a lot of technological advances, and with something like nuclear weapons or climate change, you start to be able to impact a planet as a whole. And once you get there, bad things start to happen. With nuclear weapons, we could literally wipe ourselves out.

And with the climate, anywhere close to the worst-case scenarios , if we keep going the way we’re going, civilization will collapse. Large parts of the Earth will be unlivable. There are people around now who are going to experience a very different Earth.

If they’re still alive, which in the nuclear case, they probably won’t be. The entropy of the universe means that it gets increasingly disordered over long spans of time. But for civilization on Earth, this is not so much entropy as it is just collapse.

It’s not a slow process. Entropy does its thing—it wins in the end. But the time scales that are relevant for these processes, the physical time scales are very long.

And what we’re talking about here is very short. For nuclear, at this moment, if someone—Biden or Putin—just decides they’ve had enough, one person, one person decides, that’s it. They can push a button.

The way everything is structured, there’s no way to countermand that, and it’s done. In 30 minutes, we’re all done. One person .

What kind of civilization sets that up, so one person can wipe out everyone and take the entire planet down? Everything, all living things, everything. That’s a little different from just entropy and historical progression. I’m not trying to be depressing.

It’s a beautiful day here in Chicago. It’s just very easy to get despondent. And then you go and you work on black holes, and it’s uplifting in a very strange way.

They’re beautiful. As is the fact that we as a species can sit here and contemplate the age of the universe. There seems to be a kind of creeping nihilism, because there’s so much that’s out of our control as individuals.

I’ve tried to spin my own version as a constructive nihilism. I am very down about our planetary happenings. But in thinking about the larger universe, there is, I think, a certain beauty in realizing our insignificance.

I think the trouble there is the temptation to give up—you get complacent. I know exactly what you’re talking about, because I definitely do the same thing. It’s so easy to get despondent.

I do have this solace that it just doesn’t matter. It’s almost like I don’t need to take it so personally. The universe is going to be fine.

But the planet really needs people to be engaged—that’s clear. And it’s not going to happen from enlightened politicians, unless everyone starts pushing for it. We do need enlightened politicians, we need enlightened corporate leaders.

But we also need an enlightened citizenry that just says: Enough is enough . We can see what’s happening to the planet now. It’s what the scientists said would happen—and they’re telling us it’s just going to get worse.

This is not OK . .