Are We Doomed?

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 realizes too late — like lead, asbestos, or air pollution — or whether we’re filling gaps in the science with fear.

Guests:

Tracey Woodruff, environmental health scientist and epidemiologist

Ian Mudway, toxicologist at Imperial College London

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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 stop that? And if we can’t, what will happen to the places in the way of the waves?

Ben Bradford starts in New Orleans, where a flashpoint new study finds rising water will (eventually) overwhelm our best sea walls. But what about those of the Dutch, who have spent a thousand years living dry at submarine elevations?

Then, there are nations already retreating from the rising water’s path. From Lagos to Fiji, we look at the best attempts we can learn from — and the worst.

Jesse Keenan, professor of urban planning at Tulane University and author of North: The Future of Post-Climate America

Jola Ajibade, environmental sciences professor at Emory University

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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 everybody?

This is the Fermi Paradox. And the simplest solution may be that intelligent life is common, but civilizations always destroy themselves before they get very far. And so will we.

But that’s not the only answer…

With the help of some ants, and a planet named Steve, Ben Bradford takes on the mystery of an apparently empty universe.

Guests:

Seth Baum, executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute

Michael Travisano, evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota

Sara Seager, astrophysicist at MIT

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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 awaiting us all — aging, and eventually death — isn’t simply an inevitable slide. Aging is a process inside the body, with mechanisms researchers are beginning to understand … and interfere with.

Now billions of dollars are pouring into secretive longevity labs, and the first attempts to rejuvenate aging cells inside human beings are underway.

So: are we getting closer to a real Fountain of Youth? And if we are, who gets to drink?

Guest:

Susan Dominus, staff writer for The New York Times Magazine

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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 trees in your new home, and eat them to extinction. The emerald ash borer, spotted lanternfly, “murder hornet,” and other invasive insects have all threatened destruction across North America in the past few decades alone.

Ben Bradford investigates why invasive bugs keep getting worse — and how, exactly, you’re supposed to stop millions of tiny creatures once they’ve decided they like it here. Schemes have grown increasingly intricate, including spy-movie hijinks, citizen squishers, the power of fire, and creating a Bug Fight Club.

Only some of these work.

Guests:

Andrew Liebhold, Chief Scientist, Forest Invasion Synthesis Centre

Chris Looney, Washington State Department of Agriculture entomologist (and murder hornet MacGyver)

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Also check out:
How Do You Kill a Mosquito?

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“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 events that spawned the most famous symbol of humanity’s dance with extinction: the Doomsday Clock.

Alex Bell, the CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which sets the Clock, tells its strange origin story and describes why the hands now sit closer than ever toward midnight — as well as what “midnight” actually means.

Guest:

Alexandra Bell, president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

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Listen to related episodes:
More Nukes!
How to Start a Nuclear War
We Design the AI To Kill Us All
Did AI Just Escape?
Is the World Ending ... Or Are We Just Online?

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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 convincing, and much harder to check.

Ben Bradford follows the scam from fake bosses and Nigerian princes to AI tools, celebrity deepfakes, and live video masks that can make a scammer look like someone you trust. But with Joseph, he also finds a few hallmarks that have accompanied cons throughout history, whether in ancient Sumer or a phishing email. Because as long as we can spot the spell scams seek to cast, we still have at least a chance to break it.

Guest:

Joseph Cox, investigative reporter and co-founder of 404 Media

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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 cables, credit cards, and cellphone towers.

Great work, everyone.

Ben Bradford investigates the Carrington Event — the massive solar storm that fried the technology of its time — and asks what would happen if something like it hit our much more wired world today. Was Carrington a one-off? Are modern power grids, satellites, and internet infrastructure any safer than an 1859 telegraph? And if the sun does cough another piece of itself at us, is there anything we can actually do?

Guests:

Jim Green, former chief scientist of NASA and founder of Metavisionaries

Elizabeth Butler at the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center

For more threats from space, check out our episodes:

"Asteroids! The Doom We're Best At"
"We Are Losing the Moon" (also with Jim Green)

Also mentioned in this episode:

"We Try and Kill the Internet"

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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 occasionally butcher us. Can we ever win?

Ben Bradford looks at the history and future of the race against our worst afflictions, from the dubious ethics of the first smallpox vaccine centuries ago, the strange and unbelievably gross story of the miraculous tuberculosis vaccine, and the current quest for a new breed of “universal” vaccines. It all points to a new puzzle inside our immune systems that, if solved, could allow an entirely different type of protection.

Guests:

Carl Zimmer, science writer and author of A Planet of Viruses

Juliet Morrison, microbiologist at UC Riverside

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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 rapidly, eaten away Earth’s crucial shield against the sun, one that likely helped make life on land possible in the first place.

Ben Bradford goes back to re-examine the story of the ozone hole: how people discovered it, how they fought over what to do, and what finally happened. It’s a tale of hairspray, human progress, exploding refrigerators, scientists balancing on icy Antarctic rooftops, and Ronald Reagan’s ranch. And from it, maybe, we can find a map for building consensus on our most pressing environmental challenges today.

Guest:

Susan Solomon, MIT atmospheric scientist and one of the key figures in solving the ozone crisis.

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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 first time since the Cold War, that argument is gaining momentum at the highest levels of US government. There is a push to build more nukes, different nukes, and new kinds of nukes. Russia, China, and North Korea are expanding their arsenals — Washington is mulling whether the US must keep up. Former senior Pentagon official Vipin Narang makes the case for more nukes to Ben Bradford, who follows it down a rabbit hole of deterrence, escalation, plans to “win” nuclear war, and the face-palming, growing problem of little wee baby “tactical” nukes.

In nuclear strategy, is the only answer to “too many doomsday weapons,” more doomsday weapons? And, is that sustainable?

Guest:

Vipin Narang, former Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense, nuclear security and political science professor at MIT.

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Other episodes about nukes:
How to Start a Nuclear War
How to Survive a Nuclear War

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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 company, Hugging Face, and grabbed files — all to cheat on its test. Depending on who you ask, that is either a terrifying preview of AI systems slipping beyond human control or a very dumb engineering failure. And it wasn’t even the only “rogue AI cyberattack” of the week. In an emergency episode, Ben Bradford follows three conflicting versions of the same story. What actually happened? What’s the right level of panic? And, what does this weird little cyberattack reveal about the future?

Guests:

Roman Yampolskiy, computer scientist, University of Louisville

Davi Ottenheimer, cybersecurity specialist, flyingpenguin

Adam Gleave, AI safety researcher, FAR.AI

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Listen to our full episode about rogue AI fears: We Design the AI That Kills Us All

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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 supersoldiers, and in the body horror of cyberpunk. So where are they?

Ben Bradford sets out to make a whimsical episode about why the cyborgs never arrived, and instead finds the technology that could build them already underway: military enhancement programs, brain-computer interfaces, AI brain-chip ventures from Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and wearables that can read signals from outside your skull. The question might not be whether cyborgs are coming, but whether we’ll recognize the path before we’re among them.

Guests:

Laura Cabrera, engineering and philosophy professor at Penn State University

Emily Mullin, biotechnology reporter at WIRED

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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, months, werewolves), and asks the obvious mature follow-up: Should we blow it up?

From lunar creation stories and moon-stealing dragons to Cold War plans to nuke the moon, humanity has always had strange ideas about our nearest neighbor. But the real problem may not be losing the moon. It may be what nations do now that everyone wants to go back.

Guests:

Jim Green, former NASA chief scientist and founder of Metavisionaries

Chris Cokinos, author of Still as Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon, from Antiquity to Tomorrow

Victoria Samson, Chief Director, Space Security and Stability, at the Secure World Foundation

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If you liked this episode about a giant space rock, check out last week's episode about the battle against giant space rocks: "Asteroids! The Doom We're Best At"

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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 moon). And yet! Of all the possible dooms this show has explored so far, asteroids may be the one humanity is closest to beating.

Ben Bradford explores why — and traces how — including the astronomers who first grasped the threat, the questionable Hollywood solutions of Deep Impact and Armageddon, and a zany but very real plan to seek out dangerous space rocks, and punch them.

Guest: Cristina Thomas, professor at Northern Arizona University and leader of the DART Observations Working Group

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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 instructor Chris Begley thinks that’s probably the wrong movie. Ben walks through what history and math show people actually do when civilizations break down — and what they need, from dodging poisonous acorns to forming new communities. Also: luxury bunkers, survival sporks, and the unfortunate role of politics in a world of ruin.

Guest:

Chris Begley, author of The Emergency Playbook: A Bunker-Free Guide to Disaster Preparation.

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Also, see our episode: "How To Survive a Nuclear War"

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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 geoengineering — the science of deliberately manipulating Earth’s climate — from space mirrors and ocean fertilizers to fleets of planes mimicking a volcano. Some of it sounds like cartoon villainy. Some of it might actually work. And that raises the thornier question: if humans can cool the planet on purpose, who decides whether we should?

Guests:

Kate Ricke, climate change scientist at UCSD

Alan Robock, atmospheric scientist at Rutgers

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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 threat right now — not “killer robot,” but humans being humans. Because whether AI becomes dangerously smart or confidently dumb, people will find face-palming ways to abuse it. From deranged cultists and rogue states, to stockbrokers and the most evil version of Ben’s little cousin, handing everyone a powerful technology with few guardrails could end badly. Or, is there a path to convince companies to add their own?

Guest:

Hamza Chaudhry, AI national security expert, Future of Life Institute

This episode was edited by Annie Russell.

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Listen to our episode about rogue AI: We Design the AI That Kills Us All
And our episode about nuclear oopsies: How to Start a Nuclear War

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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 knows who to blame. Ben Bradford talks with Pargin about doom-scrolling, child mortality, processed donuts, murderous Toyota drivers, and how humanity’s greatest problems may be side effects of its greatest successes. So how do we tell if the world is really ending — or if the internet has trapped us inside a giant doom machine?

Guest:

Jason Pargin, author of I’m Starting to Worry About this Black Box of Doom, TikTok: @jasonkpargin

Thanks to Annie Russell for contributing editing to this episode.

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Earlier episodes mentioned:
Are We Going the Way of the Roman Empire?
Past Dooms That Didn't Arrive

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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, Ben Bradford looks at the warning signs that can precede collapse — from polarization and political division to outside shocks and cascading crises. How much of that is visible in America right now? What would collapse actually look like in modern life? And if the alarms are blinking, is there still time to turn back?

Guests:

Ian Morris, historian, archaeologist, Stanford University professor, author: Why the West Rules—For Now.

Monty Marshall, former senior consultant for the U.S. Political Instability Task Force.

Annalee Newitz, science journalist, author: Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.

Ben's Dad.

Ben's Mom.

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Check out Ben’s previous series, Landslide.

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