Times

Minutes to Midnight's distinctive aspiration is to tell the story of the Anthropocene Era since 1763 along with some discussion of the development of natural science but much more of the study of history during the same period. Before we reach our conclusion, arguing for a pandisciplinary approach to the present crisis, let us attempt a summary.

In the late eighteenth century, the Anthropocene Era reached a key stage with the early atmospheric concentration of several ‘greenhouse gases’. Scientific advance accompanying industrial revolution and political imbroglio led to the creation and use of the atomic bomb in 1945, giving rise to the creation of the Doomsday Clock in 1947. In 2007, the setting of the Doomsday Clock at six minutes to midnight added climate-changing technologies to the nuclear threat. Optimism soon faded further. The lack of political action on climate change and nuclear weapons took the clock forward a further three minutes by 2015, then to two minutes before potential global disaster in 2018. Keeping the clock at the same time in 2019, the board added a reference to ‘disruptive technologies’ including synthetic biology, artificial intelligence and cyberwarfare. Then, in 2020, ‘closer than ever’, it moved the clock forward again to 100 seconds before midnight, arguing that the twin nuclear and ecological crisis was compounded by ‘a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare’ intensified by an eroding ‘international political infrastructure’.

We have not presumed to examine in detail these and other scientific phenomena. Rather, we have attempted to throw some light on two themes: the narrative of history since the onset of the Anthropocene Era; the manner in which historians and other investigators have reacted to this narrative. In other words, we have looked at history in both interconnected senses: the past, and the consideration of the past.

The argument about what happened and how it was analysed may be summarised as follows. The development of the Anthropocene Era from the late eighteenth century signalled the interaction of human activity with geological development, bringing together two orders of time, aeons and centuries. The main reason for the conjuncture was the onset of the Industrial Revolution of coal and iron, set in motion by the steam engine perfected by James Watt.