Podcasts · Science · Society & Culture

Are We Doomed?

NPR Network

28 episodes

Is the world ending, or does it just feel like it? "Are We Doomed?" investigates the greatest risks facing society, the planet, and our species. What’s real? What’s hype? And how do we actually make it out alive? Nukes. Asteroids. Autocracy. Rogue AI. Climate-driven pandemics. Angry hippopotamuses. Teeth clenched, curiosity engaged, quips ready, this “slightly narrative” podcast explores everything from the existential and the unexpected to the overblown. Award-winning public radio journalist Ben Bradford brings you wild true stories, high-production sound design, and world-class experts answering the questions they never prepared for (“Why is the Earth doing this to us?”). From NuanceTales and distributed by the NPR Network, this show delves into history, science, technology, and the natural world, to help you separate legitimate world-changing risks from doomsday fantasies. Come for the supervolcano under Yellowstone National Park (real), stay to learn why the post-apocalyptic wasteland won’t look like the movies (sorry, you won’t be wandering with a shotgun and a dog), and leave with a better understanding of how our brilliant, bumbling species can chart a path through our current, terrifying adolescence.

Episodes

  1. Is the Microplastic In You Really Bad?

    · 32 min

    You have plastic in you. In your lungs, your gut, your blood, maybe your brain. That sounds bad. But how bad? Ben Bradford investigates whether microplastics are shaping up to be one of those hazards humanity…

  2. How High Can You Build a Seawall?

    · 33 min

    It’s a particularly watery moment, with a hurricane on the Gulf Coast and El Niño-fueled waves flooding California homes. Not helping: The seas are rising, and they’re going to keep rising. How much can we build to…

  3. Can Other Planets Tell Us Our Fate?

    · 32 min

    The universe should be crawling with life. With hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and hundreds of billions of galaxies, at least someone must have gotten a few billion years’ head start on us. So where is…

  4. Can Science Defeat Aging?

    · 35 min

    Why are babies born young? How come a squirrel lives longer than a rat, but not as long as a naked mole rat (or Ben’s cousin’s tortoise)? Scientific breakthroughs over the past few decades suggest the ultimate doom…

  5. Bug Fight Club

    · 40 min

    You’re a critter in the forest, peacefully munching on a tree — until it’s chopped down, turned into a pallet, and you’re shipped across the ocean. What do you do? Sometimes, the answer is escape, find defenseless…

  6. Who Keeps Winding the Doomsday Clock?

    · 35 min

    “Uh oh,” said several Manhattan Project scientists after they helped build a bomb and then it got used. They jumped to stop it from ever being used again. Solution: a newsletter. Through a somewhat convoluted chain of…

  7. Can "Scams" Be a Doom?

    · 36 min

    Scams are old. Mesopotamia old. Snake oil old. They haven’t doomed us yet. But investigative journalist Joseph Cox of 404 Media sees something changing: new technology is making the oldest cons more personal, more…

  8. Just a Minor Sun Explosion

    · 37 min

    In 1859, the sky turned blood-red, telegraph machines sparked and chattered, and some of their batteries exploded. Then humanity responded by building a civilization that runs on electricity, satellites, GPS, internet…

  9. The Everything Vaccine

    · 41 min

    From mild runny noses to savage pandemics, viruses and other pathogens have tormented humans for all of history. We are locked in a perpetual race against tiny shapeshifting enemies that mutate, spread, and…

  10. What Ever Happened to the Ozone Hole?

    · 37 min

    A dark blue wound across the bottom of the world — that’s what NASA images showed in the 1980s. It was a hole in the ozone layer, eight million square miles across. Human activity and convenience had quietly, but…

  11. More Nukes!

    · 32 min

    The best defense against nuclear weapons is nuclear weapons, according to the logic of deterrence. It has guided US defense policy for nearly 80 years. So, shouldn’t more nukes prevent nuclear war even more? For the…

  12. Did AI Just Escape?

    · 31 min

    A bizarre cyberattack on an AI company, it was revealed last week, came from an AI. An autonomous “agent” from OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT) slipped its confines, reached the open internet, breached the security of another…

  13. Now I'm Scared of Cyborgs

    · 40 min

    For more than a century, science fiction has imagined cyborgs: humans fused with machines to outrun the limits of the body. They show up in Edgar Allan Poe, in the gleaming menace of Darth Vader, in Halo’s armored…

  14. We Are Losing the Moon

    · 38 min

    The moon is drifting away. What does it mean? What do we do? With help from a poet, a space security expert, and the former chief scientist of NASA, Ben Bradford explores what the moon has done for Earth (tides, myths,…

  15. Asteroids! The Doom We're Best At

    · 37 min

    You probably knew an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but it was so much worse than that. Asteroids and other space rocks have been the most destructive forces ever to hit Earth, yielding mass extinctions (and the…

  16. Our Vision of the Post-Apocalypse Is Wrong

    · 34 min

    What would it take to survive after "the end of the world?" A whole culture of prepping often focuses on a familiar fantasy: grab the gear, flee the city, defend the bunker, survive alone. Anthropologist and survival…

  17. Is Geoengineering A Good Idea?

    · 39 min

    The planet is heating up, every plan to stop it has fallen short, and growing group of scientists has started to ask a stranger question: what if we grabbed the thermostat ourselves? Ben Bradford investigates…

  18. The True AI Threat is People

    · 36 min

    Imagine a friendly assistant that can help you build a bioweapon. Or a chatbot in the nuclear weapons chain, cheerfully hallucinating an attack. AI national security expert Hamza Chaudhry worries this is the biggest…

  19. Is the World Ending or Are We Just Online?

    · 32 min

    Are we living through the end times or the best moment in human history? Novelist and internet veteran Jason Pargin argues you have spent your life inside a “literal reverse apocalypse” — and if you don’t see it, he…

  20. Are We Going the Way of the Roman Empire?

    · 37 min

    Historically, societies fall. Civilizations collapse. But is that what’s happening now in the United States? With the help of historians, a former CIA-funded researcher on political instability, and one grumbling dad,…

  21. We Try and Kill the Internet

    · 33 min

    The internet is how you get your news, your paycheck, your groceries, your banking, and sometimes your drinking water. Humanity has quietly handed over the keys to civilization to a network most of us don't understand…

  22. Past Dooms That Didn't Arrive

    · 34 min

    People have been predicting the end of the world forever. They’ve always been wrong. Maybe we’re wrong today, too. So, we’re looking back at three past dooms predicted in the 20th century, none of which arrived as…

  23. How To Survive a Nuclear War

    · 38 min

    The air raid sirens scream (actually, they don’t work anymore). An emergency alert goes out, because … nuclear missiles are in-bound. It’s happening! How do we survive (non-Hollywood edition)? From diving into…

  24. How Do You Kill a Mosquito?

    · 35 min

    Mosquitoes are little jerks. They suck your blood to make more mosquitoes, spread deadly diseases like malaria and dengue, and have killed more humans than any other creature in the history of Earth. But now, we can…

  25. Supervolcano!

    · 41 min

    A supervolcano burbles under Yellowstone National Park. Enormous. Real. According to the internet’s most excitable corners, just itching to turn America into charcoal any minute now. Ben Bradford investigates what…

  26. Let’s Design the AI That Kills Us All

    · 36 min · Explicit

    Maddeningly, even some researchers building artificial intelligence see it as a potential existential threat on par with nuclear war. Ben Bradford follows three simple steps that could lead an AI to turn on humanity…

  27. How To Start a Nuclear War

    · 37 min

    Humanity has repeatedly brought itself to the brink of nuclear war. Which raises a question: if everyone who can launch a nuke knows that could end the world, why does nuclear war still feel plausible? Ben explores how…

  28. Introducing Are We Doomed?

    · 2:06 · Trailer

    Grin at the apocalypse and find out with this curious, irreverent weekly podcast exploring the biggest dangers to our society and our species. From nuclear war and societal collapse to rogue AI and the moon drifting…

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