Should we worry about the end of the world?
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I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday Story from Up First. The other day, I met a guy with a very unusual list.
I've been keeping a notepad, a tally of ways the world could end. It has 141 entries so far. Should we be worried?
This is Ben Bradford, host of a new podcast called Are We Doomed? Ben's show explores the biggest risks society, the planet, and our species are facing.
There are so many things that could take humanity out. Nuclear war, climate change, pandemics, maybe AI. And the less immediately worrisome, your super volcanoes, aliens, or something called gray goo.
Why did Ben Bradford start keeping a list of ways the world could end?
And it helps listeners figure out which future dooms are actually worth worrying about and how we might survive whatever is coming our way.
The post-apocalypse, it turns out, is almost certainly a group project.
Today on the Sunday Story, is the world ending or does it just feel that way? Stay with us.
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We're back with the Sunday story. Today I'm talking to Ben Bradford, host of the new podcast from the NPR network called Are We Doomed? Ben, welcome to The Sunday Story.
Great to be here.
So why did you start making that list of doomsday scenarios? And I mean, how did you even begin to answer that question? Like, are we doomed?
Yeah. I had been a business reporter, an energy environment reporter, a politics reporter. And I think that those things together start making you wonder if you're doomed. And then over the last several years, I was covering political history and division and polarization and what shaped where we are. And I think it's kind of natural to ask, well, what's coming next. And I do think that there's this real feeling of doom in our culture right now. This sense of bleakness. And I wanted to know, like, what's real and what's not? And also, why are we so obsessed with it in our pop culture, with our zombie movies and our alien movies and all of those things? And so that's what we do on our show. And that's actually been really fun to look at those things and also to ask questions like, well...
How do we stop these really real, practical things that are actual threats? How do we stop them from happening? And what are the ones that we just don't have to worry about?
Well, the podcast launched back in April, so you've been researching and talking to lots of experts. What would you say are the most pressing existential risks that humanity is facing right now?
So the experts that I talk to and the places that track this, there are places that track what is called existential risk or global catastrophic risk. They really put four on the list. And that is nuclear war, climate change, pandemics, and then AI is typically on the list now, which is really interesting. And one of the things that connects all of these dangers and makes them really pressing is that really the danger is us. These are things that are made by humans. You know, we're talking about man-made climate change, the ability for nations, rogue states to manipulate viruses, those kinds of things.
So let's start there with the human-made threats. People have been sounding the alarm bells about AI.
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