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.

Support Are We Doomed?, get bonus episodes, and more: https://doompod.com/support/

Watch earlier episodes on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@arewedoomedpod

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.

Support Are We Doomed?, get bonus episodes, and more: https://doompod.com/support/

Watch earlier episodes on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@arewedoomedpod

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

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

Support Are We Doomed?, get bonus episodes, and more: https://doompod.com/support/

Watch earlier episodes on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@arewedoomedpod

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

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

Support Are We Doomed?, get bonus episodes, and more: https://doompod.com/support/

Watch earlier episodes on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@arewedoomedpod

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

Support Are We Doomed?, get bonus episodes, and more: https://doompod.com/support/

Watch earlier episodes on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@arewedoomedpod

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"

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

Support Are We Doomed?, get bonus episodes, and more: https://doompod.com/support/

Watch earlier episodes on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@arewedoomedpod

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.

Support Are We Doomed?, get bonus episodes, and more: https://doompod.com/support/

Watch earlier episodes on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@arewedoomedpod

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

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

Support Are We Doomed?, get bonus episodes, and more: https://doompod.com/support/

Watch earlier episodes on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@arewedoomedpod