Are We Doomed? podcast artwork
Science

Are We Doomed?

by NPR Network
ScienceSociety & Culture

Today: #80 in Science on our combined chart.

If you like Are We Doomed?, try…

Ranking history · United States

Latest daily rankings: Oct 21. New rankings will appear after the next update.

Position on the Science combined chart over the last 7 days. Toggle platforms to compare their positions. Lower rank numbers are better.

#50#63#77#90#103Chart rankOct 15Oct 17Oct 19Oct 21#80
View as table
DateCombined RankApple PodcastsPocket CastsCastbox
Oct 21#80#54—#54
Oct 20#90#65—#70
Oct 19#93#64—#59
Oct 18#81#50—#50
Oct 17#80#52#49#55
Oct 16#73#47#46#46
Oct 15#60#36#34#34

Latest episodes

  • How High Can You Build a Seawall?

    October 13, 2026 · 33 min

    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 Other Planets Tell Us Our Fate?

    October 6, 2026 · 32 min

    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…

  • Can Science Defeat Aging?

    September 29, 2026 · 35 min

    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…

  • Bug Fight Club

    September 22, 2026 · 40 min

    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…

  • Who Keeps Winding the Doomsday Clock?

    September 15, 2026 · 35 min

    “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…

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  • Can "Scams" Be a Doom?

    September 8, 2026 · 36 min

    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…

  • Just a Minor Sun Explosion

    September 1, 2026 · 37 min

    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…

  • The Everything Vaccine

    August 25, 2026 · 41 min

    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…

  • What Ever Happened to the Ozone Hole?

    August 18, 2026 · 37 min

    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…

  • More Nukes!

    August 11, 2026 · 32 min

    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…

  • Did AI Just Escape?

    August 4, 2026 · 31 min

    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…

  • Now I'm Scared of Cyborgs

    July 28, 2026 · 40 min

    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…

Full episode archive on Apple Podcasts →

About the show

Is the world ending, or does it just feel like it? "Are We Doomed?" investigates the greatest risks facing society, the planet, and our species. What’s real? What’s hype? And how do we actually make it out alive? Nukes. Asteroids. Autocracy. Rogue AI. Climate-driven pandemics. Angry hippopotamuses. Teeth clenched, curiosity engaged, quips ready, this “slightly narrative” podcast explores everything from the existential and the unexpected to the overblown. Award-winning public radio journalist Ben Bradford brings you wild true stories, high-production sound design, and world-class experts answering the questions they never prepared for (“Why is the Earth doing this to us?”). From NuanceTales and distributed by the NPR Network, this show delves into history, science, technology, and the natural world, to help you separate legitimate world-changing risks from doomsday fantasies. Come for the supervolcano under Yellowstone National Park (real), stay to learn why the post-apocalyptic wasteland won’t look like the movies (sorry, you won’t be wandering with a shotgun and a dog), and leave with a better understanding of how our brilliant, bumbling species can chart a path through our current, terrifying adolescence.