The following grim hymn is deadicated to Dominic Cummings, whose recent comings & goings, to-ings & fro-ings, during lockdown, revealed he was prepared to drive right out of his way to get to an optician, in case his eyesight was failing. Or that's his story. What a people's history will make of it, is quite another matter, assuming, of course, there is much of a future to look forward to. Unless we are blinkered or wearing rose-colored spectacles, this civilisation appears to be in considerable, credible danger of fairly (unfairly?) imminent collapse. As a result of human activity, the 6th Mass Extinction is already underway & we face near term human extinction too. Eeyore, I may be, rather than Pangloss, but just thought I'd try to cheer you up.

The Doomsday Clock is a symbol that represents the likelihood of a man-made global catastrophe. Maintained since 1947 by the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Clock is a metaphor for threats to humanity from unchecked scientific and technical advances. The Clock represents the hypothetical global catastrophe as "midnight" and the Bulletin's opinion on how close the world is to a global catastrophe as a number of "minutes" to midnight, assessed in January of each year. The main factors influencing the Clock are nuclear risk and global warming (climate change.)The Bulletin's Science and Security Board also monitors new developments in the life sciences and technology that could inflict irrevocable harm to humanity.

The Clock's original setting in 1947 was seven minutes to midnight. It has been set backward and forward 24 times since then, the largest-ever number of minutes to midnight being 17 (in 1991), and the smallest 100 seconds (1 minute and 40 seconds) in January 2020.
The clock was set at two minutes to midnight in January 2018, and left unchanged in 2019 due to the twin threats of nuclear weapons and the increasing effects of global warming. On 23 January 2020, it was moved forward to 100 seconds (1 minute 40 seconds) before midnight, based on the increased threats to global stability posed by "a nuclear blunder", exacerbated by the rate of climate change.
 

^Wikipedia