OK Doomer: Debunking Academia’s Fearmongering “Doomsday Clock”

On January 27th, 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that their “Doomsday Clock,” an analogy for global apocalypse, has ticked down 4 additional seconds since its last calibration in 2025. The Clock, which has traditionally sat in the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy Building, is now set just 85 seconds away from striking midnight, spelling the end of the world. To explain their bleak prediction, the organization’s group, featuring numerous UChicago faculty, pointed to issues such as expiring nuclear treaties, artificial intelligence, climate change, and “disinformation” to justify their fears. 

The Bulletin has explicitly claimed: “We are not partisan; we believe that government policies must be based on facts, not ideology.” Yet, their recent adjustments of the Doomsday Clock, guided by their assortment of so-called experts, has revealed an interesting trend in how the Clock has moved when Donald Trump was president versus when Joe Biden was. Over the past nine years (2017–2025), the Doomsday Clock has ticked down closer to global apocalypse in 4 out of Trump’s 5 years in office thus far (80% of the time), compared to just 1 out of Biden’s 4 years in office (20% of the time). Furthermore, under Trump’s presidency, the Clock has been ticked down a total of 85 seconds, dwarfing the mere 10 second decline seen under Biden’s presidency—a stark disparity in the purportedly non-partisan assessments of global risk by the Bulletin. These movements are summarized below, with negative values signifying shifts “closer to midnight,” i.e., the global apocalypse.

Total change under Trump: -85 seconds closer to midnight (-20s/year towards midnight)

Total change under Biden: -10 seconds closer to midnight (-2.5s/year towards midnight)

Comparing the average annual shift towards apocalypse under Trump (-20s/year) and Biden (-2.5s/year) reveals that, according to the Bulletin, the world moved towards global apocalypse 8 times faster under Trump’s presidency than under Joe Biden’s. Now, ask yourself: was the world really 8 times more dangerous, risky, or volatile under Trump’s presidency than Joe Biden’s? The answer is empirically no.

The Volatility Index of the S&P 500 (VIX) can give us a sense of market volatility over time that can be compared to the highly Trump-averse sentiments portrayed in the Doomsday Clock. Given that the VIX measures markets that aggregate countless individual bets backed by real money, its quantifications of volatility should furthermore be non-partisan according to the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Graphs of average annual VIX over given years, as well as daily VIX changes from 2021-2026, are provided below.

Average year-over-year Average VIX changes under Trump: +2.696 (a net increase reflecting heightened uncertainty in 2020 and a rebound in 2025).

Average year-over-year Average VIX changes under Biden: -1.37 (a net decrease indicating stabilizing markets post-2020). 

Daily Shifts in VIX from 2021-2026

As can be seen, volatility rose modestly overall under Trump’s term, largely due to exogenous shocks like the pandemic, but generally declined under Biden’s. If the Doomsday Clock truly measured objective risk, we’d expect a modest alignment with these incentivized market signals—not an 8x exaggeration that conveniently parallels partisan narratives.

For a final glimpse at the so-called brilliance of the Bulletin’s Doomsday Clock, let’s look at where its hands have pointed during important times in recent history. According to the Bulletin, we are apparently closer to global apocalypse today than we have ever been in the past nearly-80 years since its creation. That’s right. We are meant to believe with a straight face that we are in more danger of ending the world today than we were during the entire Cold War, during wars in the Middle East, and perhaps most laughably, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

There is a reason the Doomsday Clock has become commonly referred to online as the “Reddit Clock.” The Clock’s advances are not intended to accurately convey risk; they are intended to “warn the population” of our own eradication to strike needless fear and loathing into our hearts to advance their political agenda and generate clicks. There is no quantifiable evidence to suggest that we are the closest we have ever been to human eradication, let alone having only 2% of the Clock left to go to reach this point. Qualitatively, it’s absurd.

The Doomsday Clock is a counterproductive menace to society. We should be excited about the future, not scared of it. The people who determine the time of this Clock are no better than those who ran the early printing press—they understand that the more striking a headline they can make with their irrational movements of the Clock, the more attention they receive to promote their political causes. We need to collectively stop listening to the fearmongering sold through the Doomsday Clock and instead return to an optimistic mode of thought, where we take pride in our technological advances, embrace our progress, and work towards a new era where the future is brighter, not doomed.