New Doomsday Clock announcement coming Thursday. Here's how to watch

Since 2020, the hands of the Doomsday Clock have sat at 100 seconds until midnight. With the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists making their 75th-anniversary announcement Thursday morning, how close are we to doomsday in 2022?

The Doomsday Clock was established in 1947 as a way for the scientific community to show world leaders and the public how close humanity is to annihilating ourselves. The purpose was to bring awareness to the threats in the hopes that leaders would make the world safer and thus move the hands of the Clock back.

In the early years of the Clock's timeline, the primary threat was nuclear war. It stood at 7 minutes to midnight its first year. As tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union worsened in the two years following, the Clock ticked forward to 2 minutes to midnight. From the 1960s through the 1980s, nuclear treaties and peace agreements between the world's nations allowed the scientists tracking world threats to move the hands of the Clock back. By 1991, they stood at 17 minutes to midnight — the furthest from doomsday that we've been since the start of the Cold War.

Two added threats have been considered in the years since. The first is the worsening threat of anthropogenic climate change. The second is the impact of disruptive technologies, which are eroding trust in our institutions through the spread of misinformation and disinformation. Taking these into account, along with the continued threat of nuclear war, has caused the Clock's hands to move closer and closer towards doomsday.