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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