That's because the calculation for the doomsday clock is purely subjective. Eventually they'll run out of minutes, subdividing more and more until the whole exercise becomes meaningless.

I'm not surprised. 7+ billion people on the planet and growing, some of whom enjoy the highest standard of living ever which requires more and more resources. Those not enjoying the high life want it. Climate change is and will continue to place ever increasing stresses on modern societies. From damage to coastal cities (where most humans live), problems growing crops due to weather changes, and water scarcity - the things we need to live in the manner we are accustomed to are becoming rarer as there are more and more of us living on the planet.

And then there are nuclear weapons. Nuclear proliferation is introducing new actors that must be accounted for when trying to prevent nuclear war. Existing actors can experience a significant change in leadership, policy, and direction - take a look at recent US politics as an example of this. You can imagine maintaining nuclear peace as a weighted graph, with every nuclear state as a node, with vertices to every other node. The graph will only continue to grow over time and the weights can change, sometimes drastically. It just becomes more unstable over time due to the strain of nationalism, climate change, and nuclear proliferation. Then throw in miscommunication and computer glitches into the nuclear mix - events like the Cuban Missile crisis and Vasili Arkhipov, Stanislav Petrov in the 1980s, Boris Yeltsin and the Norwegian Rocket Incident, and unfortunately many others. The risk of large scale nuclear conflict is only growing. Yes, I'm aware of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) and how as a policy it has helped us so far. But MAD is less effective for smaller nation states and rogue groups (who will more easily obtain materials and know-how over time), it works until it doesn't. And MAD does nothing for the miscommunication and computer glitch scenarios I have provided. It's not a magical blanket that will protect us from the consequences of having nuclear weapons.

Sorry for the rant. I think this will be our Great Filter. I hope I'm wrong.

- Links:

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/03/you-and-almost-e...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...

I think it's super interesting to read the Timeline of Doomsday Clock changes from the bottom up.