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

Also check out:
How Do You Kill a Mosquito?

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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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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

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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

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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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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"