Originally published in: 02/02/2026
Dear One World Friends
This week was an important week for humanity and for One World.
As you can see via this link, this past Tuesday, the Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists announced that in 2025, humanity took another large step backward as the only aware species in a universe 13.8 billion years old that extends across 93 billion light years continued to ignore the urgent warnings of a group that Einstein and Oppenheimer helped create.
On January 27th, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists revealed that in 2025, our species moved substantially closer to self-destruction. The scientists determined that we are now 4 seconds closer to Doomsday at 85 seconds to midnight. They explained that“A year ago, the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board warned that the world was perilously close to global disaster and that any delay in reversing course increased the probability of catastrophe. Rather than heed this warning, Russia, China, the United States, and other major countries have instead become increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic.“
For the first time ever, One World organized a Bulletin Watch event where we tried to put the Bulletin decision in perspective with a presentation where we explained that:
- The bombs that were detonated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago, split human history into two parts before and after; before when civilization’s survival was assumed and after when it became a choice we must consciously make each and every day.
- That Oppenheimer the principal architect of the bomb understood full well the dilemma he had evoked by engineering a technological conquest over nature out of all proportion to our moral strength.
- That according to the Bulletin the prospects of self-destruction have grown dramatically from the safest ever 17 minutes to midnight in 1991 to a period starting in 2020 that the Bulletin needed to start measuring the distcance to self-destruction in seconds and not minutes.
In thinking about a response we made clear that we are not helpless and that we should not stick our heads in the sand but rather take stock of the emerging X-Risk eco-system and recognize that we are all co-creators of the universe who are living at the hinge of history. Our thesis is simple the next two decades will be the most consequential in human history and those of us alive today will determine the fate of our species for mileenia to come.
In his inaugural speech in January 1961, former US President John F. Kennedy explained our challenge in very clear terms:
“The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the ability to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”
Our technological tools have grown exponentially more powerful since 1961 leading to dramatic increases in our human population (+ 5 billion) and human well-being with GDP growing 10x in constant dollars and GDP per capita growing 2x to 3x depending on the deflator.
However, unfortunately our success as “wise humans” (Homo Sapiens) has not kept pace with our success as Homo Technologics. According to the scientists at the Bulletin it now seems far more likely we will use these dramatic advances in technology to destroy ourselves rather use them to bring an end to poverty, hunger, disease and the need to work. This trend is consistent with the extremely worrisome Great Filter Theory.
We prefer to be much more positive and we believe that this new-found technological capacity to build a world of Super Abudnance provides us with a much-needed light at the end of the tunnel.
We believe that if,if,if we can keep our global civilization intact until the year 2050 the gains we have made since 1961 will be greatly multiplied to the point that anyone alive then will live better than the billionaires of today. The problem we face as the Bulletin points out is the kind of cooperation needed to bring about this world seems less and less obvious. One World is committed to reversing that trend.
Last year at this time we also reported on the Bulletin decision to move the clock one second forward and also highlighted the dramatic technological breakthrough brought on by DeepSeek.
Our hope was the combination of the Bulletin forewarning combined with the positive technological breakthrough would be enough to being to generate a wakeup call such that we were hoping that:
2025 The Year Humanity Found its Way
We are once again hoping that 2026 will be the year humanity begins to find its way but will be much more proactive in pursuing our case, starting with a global conversation on the future of the humanity we will be lauching later this week. Please keep an eye out for this all important global conversation.
In the meantime please have a look at the webinar we hosted on Tuesday to coincide with the announcement.
1/24/26 The Future of Humanity-doomsday clock event.mp4 – Google Drive
Best regards,
Joe
PS: One World was not the only group to write about the move to 85 seconds by the Bulletin. In its January newsletter, MIT’s Future of Life Institute wrote about this move and the numerous AI conversations that took place at Davos: MIT Future of Life Jan 2026 Newsletter
