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The world is going to end. Human life and most likely all other life forms that inhabit the earth will also end. Nothing will then exist on the earth—not even an echo of what once was called “humanity.”

There is a clock that measures how much time life has left on earth. It’s called the “Doomsday Clock.” It was established in 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists—a group of scientists at the University of Chicago who participated in the Manhattan Project, an American-led project that build the first workable atomic bomb.

The “Bomb” showed that human life is not only fallible but extinguishable. It was the first real warning to all mankind that human beings had, in effect, created their own potential extinction.

The Doomsday theory predicts that once the clock strikes midnight the world will end. Scientists from around the world monitor human activity on a regular basis to gauge the amount of time human life has left on earth.

These scientists have methodically inched the Doomsday Clock toward midnight since 1947 when it was set at 11:53 p.m.

Each January the scientists warn the human population that it has only so many minutes left on earth.

As mankind has continued its determined suicidal efforts over the past 73 years to destroy the earth’s environment, to create more lethal weapons of mass destruction, and to plunder all of the earth’s finite life-sustaining resources, the time left on the clock has been reduced to just 100 seconds, according to the January 2020 statement by the Atomic Bulletin of Scientists.

This dire warning is the closest the Clock has been to human extinction.

“Humanity,” the Thursday warning by the ABS read, “continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers—nuclear war and climate change—that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond. The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have allowed the international infrastructure for managing them to erode.”

This relentless, irreversible march toward human self-destruction is caused by the one force that has driven, motivated, and even consumed human endeavors throughout its existence: the corruption of power.

 Power indeed corrupts, and it corrupts wholly and without distinction. Power corrupts governments, political institutions, religions, human institutions of every stripe, and even individual human relationships.

From the first moment of its constitutional existence in 1787, America has been, and continues to be, an experiment in how much corruption a nation can absorb before it falls into ruin. Our own history, even as told from a self-serving perspective, teaches that corruption lies deep in the core of the nation’s political institutions; it has shamed, in one way or another, every religion practiced in the nation’s history; it has tarnished every method for securing wealth and progress in the name of good capitalism; and it has kept Americans divided and polarized along racial, ethnic, and cultural lines in the most despicable ways imaginable, including slavery.

And, yet, until recently, America has always been considered the “model” of peace, liberty and justice for all by other countries throughout the world. This despite the fact that America created the atomic bomb, has destroyed more of the earth’s environment than any other nation, and has pillaged the earth’s resources more than anyone else just to make its citizens more comfortable, more consuming, and more insatiable.

And, so, here we are—just 100 seconds left on the Doomsday Clock with old bubba down on the Alabama river bank commenting, “shit, them damn scientists don’t know what they talking about … there’s plenty fish left in this river.”

Yes, bubba, and the Pacific’s high tide will soon be rising in Tucson.