Past Dooms That Didn't Arrive

Summary

Are We Doomed? — NPR Network

Episode: Past Dooms That Didn’t Arrive

Host: Ben Bradford

Air Date: May 26, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of "Are We Doomed?" explores the history of apocalyptic predictions that have not come true, focusing on three major 20th-century doomsday fears: the population bomb, robotic takeover, and nuclear annihilation. Host Ben Bradford, alongside "Paleofuture" chronicler Matt Novak, reflects on why humans tend to fixate on such predictions, the pitfalls of future-gazing, and how lessons from past failed dooms may help us better evaluate actual risks today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Human Obsession with Doom (00:21–03:56)

• Ben Bradford describes a 1967 demonstration of a robot pouring coffee as a metaphor for the way society projects fears and hopes onto technology.
• He outlines the episode’s goal: “Are there pitfalls others in the past have fallen into that we can avoid... Will some of the things that seem so scary now someday look as trite as that machine arm pouring coffee?” (02:47)
• Introduction to Matt Novak, creator of “Paleofuture,” who investigates yesterday’s visions of tomorrow.

2. Case Study #1: The Population Bomb (06:12–14:47)

• Background: Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb predicted unchecked population growth would cause global famine, societal collapse, and mass death.
• Why the Panic?
  • The arithmetic seemed undeniable: food was growing arithmetically, population exponentially.
  • “He didn't think there was any way we would get to 8 billion people before an absolute collapse.” — Matt Novak (07:15)
• Societal & Political Response
  • Massive cultural impact: bestsellers, media appearances.
  • Draconian policies: India’s forced sterilization, China’s one-child policy—all rooted in this fear (09:03, 09:10).
  • “The real harm from the population bomb came from draconian attempts to fight a doom that wasn’t there.” — Ben Bradford (10:05)
• Where the Prediction Failed
  • “It is a political choice that people are starving today.” — Matt Novak (10:05)
  • Ignored technological and agricultural revolutions: Norman Borlaug’s “super wheat,” better fertilizers, and new farming methods vastly increased food supply (10:49–11:27).
  • Key Framework: Tunnel vision—focusing too narrowly on one variable, ignoring innovation and unexpected change.
• Lesson #1
  • “If history is a guide, we’re probably going to be wrong about how things will play out.” — Ben Bradford (13:30)
  • Optimism comes from uncertainty and the prospect of unknown solutions.

3. Case Study #2: Robotic Takeover and Futurism Tropes (15:58–25:50)

• Wrong-But-Not-That-Wrong Predictions
  • Videophones, light pens, and touchscreens: technology sometimes arrives much later or in unexpected forms (16:41-17:07).
• Wild Predictions: Mini Hippos & Murder Pigs
  • Brief comedic relief about the bizarre idea of mini hippos as pets (17:07-18:08).
• The Persistent Fear of Robots
  • Deep cultural roots: from the 1920s play R.U.R. coining the term "robot" to coverage in the 1940s and 1930s.
  • “What kind of robots are we supposed to have right now?” — Ben Bradford, humorously noting unmet predictions (18:55)
  • “It was an extremely common fear in the 1930s especially.” — Matt Novak (19:33)
• Analysis: Predictions Reflect Their Times
  • Future visions tended to reflect contemporary anxieties or hopes: Robots as emancipation from labor during tough working conditions; as threats amid unemployment or war fears.
  • “The thing that they all have in common is change. Whether that's technological change or social change, people are concerned about what's right around the corner. And I think that's perfectly natural.” — Matt Novak (22:28)
• Lesson #2
  • Big utopias and dystopias aren't forecasts, but mirrors of current fears and desires. Many predications targeted the symbolic year 2000, highlighting their cultural, rather than scientific, basis (25:09).
  • AI is cited as a contemporary rerun of robot-related doom predictions.

4. Case Study #3: Nuclear Annihilation (29:11–35:07)

• Perceived Inevitability
  • Children in the 1960s BBC interviews almost expect nuclear war: “All these atomic bombs will be dropping around the place and the whole world will just melt. Oblivion. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.” (29:52)
• Evolution of Nuclear Predictions
  • The 1940s–60s: escalation seemed certain, proliferation inevitable. Newsweek predicted “50 nuclear powers” by 2000 (31:37).
  • Attempted normalization: Newsweek’s “rationalization” envisioned tactical, smaller nukes, not global doom (32:11).
• How the Real Threat Was Averted
  • “The only reason that we don't have a future where more nations have them is because of a lot of work by a lot of people and also... the vagaries of history.” — Ben Bradford (32:53)
• Active Prevention
  • The crucial insight: We made the original doomsday predictions wrong—via arms control, diplomacy, non-proliferation treaties, and political action.
  • “I do know for certain that the future is built. And that is to me one of the most important things in studying past visions of the future: that all of these are choices.” — Matt Novak (33:19)
• Lesson #3
  • The “hidden truth” of the world—via David Graeber’s quote: “It is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.” (34:43)
  • Doom is not fate; it’s both avoidable and optional, given agency and action.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Past Futurism:
  “It's always fun looking back at tomorrow.” – Matt Novak (04:48)

• On Tunnel Vision in Prediction:
  "You look at one element of that future and discount other elements that will have its force." – Matt Novak (11:35)

• On False (and Harmful) Certainty:
  “When you paint them as inevitable... it gives people a false impression.” – Matt Novak (13:39)

• On Technology and Society:
  “It's harder to regulate the flying car than to build it.” – Ben Bradford (12:38)

• On Robotic Predictions as Social Mirrors:
  “Predictions of the future often say more about our current hopes and fears.” – Ben Bradford (22:42)

• On Human Agency in Avoiding Doom:
  “All of these are choices.” – Matt Novak (33:19)

• On Possibility & Optimism:
  “We have a historical record of more than 100 years of people being worried about doom... and they were wrong or they made it wrong. So I think the most hopeful lesson... we can be wrong too.” – Ben Bradford (35:07)

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Timestamped Guide to Important Segments

• 00:21–03:56 — The Biltmore robot, framing the theme of failed doomsday predictions
• 06:12–14:47 — The Population Bomb: predictions, real-world consequences, and why they didn't arrive
• 15:58–25:50 — Robotic future and other technological prophecies: how and why they miss; mini hippos and murder-pig jokes
• 29:11–35:07 — Nuclear war anxieties, historical inevitability challenged, and the role of collective action in averting doom

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Takeaways

• Doom Is Usually Overstated, Rarely Arrives As Predicted
  • Most existential threats feared in recent history failed to manifest in the ways predicted.
• Human Agency Matters
  • The future is “built”—by active intervention, innovation, and political and social choices.
• Past Predictions Reflect Today More Than Tomorrow
  • Utopias and disasters say more about our era’s anxieties and dreams than about the actual future.
• Uncertainty Is Hopeful
  • If we keep working, the fact that the past’s dooms haven’t arrived may bode well for our ability to head off the next ones.

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Next Episode Teaser

Ben Bradford hints that the next episode will tackle whether the Internet could constitute our next real existential risk.

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Summary prepared for listeners who want the substance and memorable moments of "Past Dooms That Didn’t Arrive" without the ads, intro, or outro fluff.

Transcript

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[Ben Bradford]

The stately Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles, 1967 jewelry glints from the wrist of a woman seated at a table a as she delicately holds out a coffee cup to be filled, steam hisses and a hydraulic powered claw swings toward the woman from an enormous two ton robot. A metal arm the size of Victor Wembanyama looms next to her and that claw gently tilts a coffee pot and pours it into the woman's cup. This was a real stunt and a In the late 60s, a mid century robotics company had set up its new industrial machine arm to pour coffee at the Biltmore, showcasing its memory and precision. A simple movement pouring coffee. But to the people there, it was dramatic because of what they thought they were seeing about the near future. The PR director of the robotics company boasted that the beast, as he called it, was faster, stronger, more capable than any man. An LA Times reporter noted something vaguely ominous about the robot and the hiss of its pneumatic fingers. The event took place at a time when films, popular media, even typically sober minded news journals predicted robot takeover machines would soon replace human labor, resulting in either a utopia of leisure or mass unemployment, possibly even extinction. At the Biltmore, it looked like proof they were on the cusp of this future, one way or the other. I bring up this moment for only one reason. Those predictions were wrong. All wrong. Wildly wrong. And that's worth remembering as we ask a certain question. This is are we doomed? From nuanced tales distributed by the npr network, I'm ben bradford. Predicting the end of the world has been a favorite pastime of humanity since probably forever. But ancient myths, doomsday cults end is near. Signs, even grounded and thoughtful projections, have one thing in common. So far, 100% of the time, they've been wrong. Maybe we're just as wrong about the possible threats we're exploring together on this show. The risks of AI Nuclear war, Meteors, Supervolcanoes. Supervolcano. It's made me wonder if there's a way to tell. Are there pitfalls others in the past have fallen into that we can avoid sleepless nights. We can spare ourselves. Will some of the things that seem so scary now someday look as trite as that machine arm pouring coffee? If we can figure that out, it might allow us to hone in on which threats truly matter. And also, maybe it'll reduce my blood pressure a tick. So this episode, we're looking back at three past dooms from the 20th century that were predicted, taken seriously, and did not come true. And there will be robots. Sometimes you just find the right person to answer your question. In this case, Matt Novak. This guy, 20 years ago, he was in a college writing class given an assignment. A very 20 years ago assignment.

[Matt Novak]

Everyone needed to start a blog. It was sort of like one of those new things that for the time that everyone should start a blog.

[Ben Bradford]

I remember.

[Matt Novak]

So everyone else in the class was starting personal blogs. I wasn't that interesting.

[Ben Bradford]

So everyone's doing, like live journals, pouring out cringy emo college confessions. And Matt Novak here decides he's going to research what people in the past said about the future.

[Matt Novak]

It was a topic that I've been thinking about for a very long time.

[Ben Bradford]

It's like a very specific idea.

[Matt Novak]

Yeah, it's actually rooted in a trip to Disney World. When I was a kid, there was a ride called Horizons, and it opened with this idea of, oh, there were these older visions of the future.

[Ben Bradford]

You tour past 19th century conceptions of flight. Someone tied to a bunch of birds, an airplane flapping its wings.

[Matt Novak]

Yep, it's always fun looking back at tomorrow.

[Ben Bradford]

It went on to the 1920s and 30s and what people thought the future would look like. Then crystals. And then it went on.

[Matt Novak]

By the time that it got to, quote, unquote, today's future, the ride was old enough that it didn't really feel like today's future.

[Ben Bradford]

Seacastle, the newest and most exciting floating city in the Pacific. Nissa Verde, the most advanced desert reclamation complex in the Western hemisphere. It was a look back at incorrect futures in a ride that was itself projecting an incorrect future.

[Matt Novak]

So it had sort of that double exposure for me.

[Ben Bradford]

Matt loved it, and he loved the idea of looking back to old visions about how things would turn out. There's even a word for paleofuture. And when he got to that college writing class, that's what he named his blog. The blog turned into a career. A column for the Smithsonian and then Gizmodo, where Matt's now a tech reporter. He still maintains paleofuture on the side. Over two decades, he's written about fashion, radio antennas on hats, food, all of it freeze dried and homes ordered right out of a catalog. But one of the topics he's written about most is doom.

[Matt Novak]

Every generation has its own Idea about what will doom them.

[Ben Bradford]

Throw a dart at the 20th century and the tenor of the worries don't look that much different from today's. People feared all kinds of society or civilization. Ending threats. I want to learn about where they aired and why. I asked Matt to start by picking the most significant single whiff which leads us to death by babies. In the mid 20th century, a hysteria swept through the United States and into the rest of the world. Books warned of an impending doom. They had titles such as Future Shock and especially Matt says the Population Bomb, written by Paul Ehrlich.

[Matt Novak]

The population bomb's basic idea is that we are not going to be able to sustain the human population beyond where we were at in the late 1960s and early 70s.

[Ben Bradford]

When you read through it, the math looked undeniable. There was only so much food the world could produce. And Ehrlich said soon there would be too many mouths to feed.

[Matt Novak]

He didn't think there was any way we would get to 8 billion people before an absolute collapse.

[Ben Bradford]

The food supply would buckle under the weight. Famine would break out, governments fall. Huge portions of the global population would waste away. Mass starvation, the book predicted. On a dying planet.

[Matt Novak]

A lot of it is fantastical. Like, he's presenting various ideas like the pope will endorse abortions. You know, that would inevitably happen because life will become so unbearable because we have overpopulation that people are going to be starving.

[Ben Bradford]

So Ehrlich's book laid out what we at Are we doomed? Might call solves.

[Matt Novak]

His big issue was that he wanted

[Ben Bradford]

zero growth, keep the population flat.

[Matt Novak]

The question was how to achieve it if you agreed with his aim.

[Ben Bradford]

Yeah, he floated simple, benign ways to halt population growth. Contraceptives, family planning services. But he also had some real supervillain ideas.

[Matt Novak]

The more extreme scenarios included spiking foreign food aid with anti fertility drugs, which is obviously an extremely unethical and horrific thing to do.

[Ben Bradford]

What impression did the book make and how widespread did this sort of fear become in society?

[Matt Novak]

Everyone was reading these books when they came out, and they were having a huge impression on the culture.

[Ben Bradford]

Bookstores sold millions of copies. Ehrlich appeared on the Tonight show, just

[Matt Novak]

the talk of the town. And everyone just felt it was inevitable that we had to do something because this was such a crisis.

[Ben Bradford]

And it wasn't just like people were wandering around worried about it.

[Matt Novak]

Right.

[Ben Bradford]

People did things.

[Matt Novak]

Yeah. Well, the government of India did introduce forced sterilization on a lot of vulnerable people.

[Ben Bradford]

China adopted its one child policy, rippling across its culture, demographics, economy, forced abortions surged, orphanages filled with abandoned babies, especially daughters, all inspired by population bomb fears. And China is still recovering.

[Matt Novak]

You see these real world effects in developing countries around the world in the 1970s, and Ehrlich holds a lot of the blame for that.

[Ben Bradford]

You probably do not spend a lot of time these days worrying about death by baby. That's because the population bomb was a total dud. People did have more kids. And world hunger is still a big, ugly, heartbreaking problem. But one of the reasons it's so enraging today is that it's not because the world has run out of food. Far from it.

[Matt Novak]

It is a political choice that people are starving today.

[Ben Bradford]

So the real harm from the population bomb came from draconian attempts to fight a doom that wasn't there. Fancy that. So I'd like to figure out why not just Ehrlich, but so many other people bought into this idea for devastating result. Matt says, well, it's easy to ridicule, but it looked like Ehrlich was right. His math seemed right.

[Matt Novak]

Well, it wasn't an unreasonable fear to worry about overpopulation, you know, because if the world can only support so many people through resources, it makes sense to be worried about that.

[Ben Bradford]

But Ehrlich missed something. Something called super wheat.

[Matt Novak]

Super wheat. The technological changes that would come along allowing us to produce more food.

[Ben Bradford]

Scientists, most famously Norman Borlaug, and farmers developed new, better growing breeds of crops, super wheat, as well as new fertilizers, new methods of watering it, multiplied the food people could grow. Imagine Ehrlich huddled over mountains of graph paper, scribbling charts of grain yields versus the demographics of India. Meanwhile, technological progress is sneaking around, changing the math.

[Matt Novak]

That's an extremely common problem for predicting the future.

[Ben Bradford]

Matt says this is an example of how predictions most often miss you look

[Matt Novak]

at one element of that future and discount other elements that will have its force.

[Ben Bradford]

We trace the trajectory of one thing we're interested in, in this case, existing food versus mouths, and forget about all kinds of other things outside that could change the equation. We get tunnel vision. Matt says there are a litany of examples, like another resource crisis, the peak oil craze.

[Matt Novak]

You know, people were told in the 70s and the 80s that we're going to run out of oil eventually. That hasn't happened.

[Ben Bradford]

Yeah, we keep finding more, right? On the flip side, if we step away from doom for a moment, Matt says tunnel vision can often lead us to expect technological advances a lot sooner than we actually get them. Flying cars, like, where is my flying car? I remember Being advertised as a kid that the flying cars were coming again.

[Matt Novak]

The FL car isn't here for not because we can't invent one. You get into the political.

[Ben Bradford]

It turns out it's harder to regulate the flying car than to build it. Like, what does that DMV test look like? And Matt says people keep making this mistake.

[Matt Novak]

Elon Musk unveiled over a decade ago now his idea for the Hyperloop. And he thought it was so genius to come up with this idea of a 600 mile an hour train, which, you know, okay, good for you. But the hard part about building a train through California is eminent domain and political issues. It's not the technology to make a train go fast. So that's the hiccup. It's almost always if you're focused on the technological futures or the social. You know, I think that's what Paul Ehrlich's problem was, was he was only focused on the social and undercounted the technology.

[Ben Bradford]

So it's really hard to predict futures. Who knew? And it's easy to get tunnel vision, especially with problems that seem intractable, like doom.

[Matt Novak]

I think that when you paint them as inevitable, as Ehrlich did, it gives people a false impression.

[Ben Bradford]

The degree of uncertainty is a reason for optimism. I think it's something that I need to keep in mind as I present you with big, imposing challenges that seem inevitable. There may be technological, social or political breakthroughs that we can't conceive of right now. A universal vaccine for future pandemics. An international agreement about AI, A hot new religion that embraces zero emissions. I don't know. I don't know. And I don't think we should stop worrying or working. Super wheat doesn't just help happen if Norman Borlaug decides to kick back and crack a beer. But I think the first lesson we can take from our look into past predictions is that if history is a guide, we're probably going to be wrong about how things will play out. And speaking of wrong, there is one technology that could spell doom or utopia, which has been consistently projected to be right around the corner. Where is it? Also the hippopotamus.

[Matt Novak]

It's not a pet you want around.

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[Ben Bradford]

A lot of predictions of the future are about what we'll surround ourselves with. Like the video phone.

[Matt Novak]

You would have a standalone appliance. It would be like a toaster in

[Ben Bradford]

the Jetsons in Star Trek in Back to the Future Part ii. Almost every vision of the future has the big old honkin videophone and for decades companies tried to make them, says Matt Novak of Paleofuture.

[Matt Novak]

They really tried, but they were just ridiculously expensive. The person you were talking to had to have one too.

[Ben Bradford]

Instead, our voice phones became smartphones, which became became videophones too. Then there's the light pen, a stylus that you touched to early computer monitors. It looked to some like it would out compete the mouse.

[Matt Novak]

It's such a different way of interacting with a computer than the version that we got.

[Ben Bradford]

We all could have had tennis elbow instead of carpal tunnel. Of course now we have touch screens so we can have both the light pen, the videophone. These are examples of predictions that people got wrong, but not that wrong. They arrived later packaged differently than pictured. Other predictions of what we have are way more off.

[Matt Novak]

So like if you look at like how people looked at pets of the

[Ben Bradford]

future, what were the pets of the future? I'm sorry to take us on a tangent.

[Matt Novak]

I remember there's a magazine called the Futurist that had ideas about, I think it was mini hippos.

[Ben Bradford]

Mini hippos?

[Matt Novak]

Yes. This idea that you had.

[Ben Bradford]

They're so mean though.

[Matt Novak]

Yeah. I don't know why.

[Ben Bradford]

Hippos, they're like the meanest animal.

[Matt Novak]

I personally don't know anything about hippos.

[Ben Bradford]

Hippopotamuses are known for murder tantrums if they glimpse you on their turf. And they don't care if you're in a boat or a truck or God help you on foot, but they will go after you with everything they've got. Hippos kill like 500 people a year. They also do a thing I'm not Joking called blood sweats. Now imagine miniaturizing that.

[Matt Novak]

I'll take your word for it. It's not a pet you want around.

[Ben Bradford]

Anyway, there is one other iconic item above all other. Wait, no, sorry, I just, I'm imagining blindly furious murder pigs the size of remote controlled cars coated in what looks like blood, repeatedly, repeatedly slamming into their owner's ankles trying to bring him down. Great idea. Anyway, there is one other iconic item above all others that has been indelibly associated with humanity's future for generations. It's technology that could spell doom or maybe utopia. And we keep predicting it'll be just over the horizon, even though it's never arrived. That is robot future. What kind of robots are we supposed to have right now?

[Matt Novak]

We are supposed to have humanoid robots looking after our every need. Okay, I must have missed that. We are still waiting on that one.

[Ben Bradford]

Yeah. The belief that robots would take over for us humans, for better or worse, has an older, longer, weirder history than you may think. In the 1940s, the New York Times was printing questions like is the robot beginning to think? And will machine displace men? You can go back further to the 1930s. A major labor group made headlines around the nation with warnings that robots would enslave humanity within 50 years.

[Matt Novak]

It was an extremely common fear in the 1930s especially.

[Ben Bradford]

You can go back further than that to the 1920s to a stage in Prague and the play that invented the word robot. Rossum's Universal Robots starts with a young woman entering a factory. She meets the manager. It turns out the factory builds mechanical people. Robots. They can do any job, they speak every language, they are unpaid. The word robot comes from a Czech term that means, means forced servitude. The play skips ahead 10 years. The robots run every aspect of the economy. They're used in war and many have started a revolt. The play skips ahead. Robots have wiped out humanity. This play rur, was a big hit, brought to London and New York, translated into dozens of languages. And the plot is eerie today. Right. It hits on the same issues we're now debating about AI and what it might mean for society or how it could go rogue and try to wipe us out. But you can go further back than that, still further than the word robot itself, all the way to the late 1800s.

[Matt Novak]

It's much older than that. The idea of these mechanical men, sort of robot was a common term in late 19th, early 20th century was mechanical men. Mechanical men, sort of the pre robot robots that you would get to do all sorts of Tasks for you.

[Ben Bradford]

Some were giant, some were small. In many of these tellings, robots would take over in a positive way. Humanoid machines would free us from drudgery and hard labor, ushering in utopia. Here's a little secret about robot future, though. Whatever its form for the past 100 plus years, you might be able to guess they were all wrong. Giant mechanical men, wrong to play rur, as prescient as it seems now, was wrong. Because if I tell you the sun's going to explode on Tuesday and it happens in 5 billion years instead, I don't get to claim credit. If you're predicting imminent robot apocalypse and you're off by 30 years or more, that's not a rounding error. You're wrong. The question we're exploring is why were they wrong? Was it a case of tunnel vision? Was it like the video phone or the light pen and people were just a bit off on the timeline and the form and it's still coming? Maybe Matt sees a different lesson. He says robot future is a great example of how our predictions, especially the big ones, utopias and dystopias and doom, are often not really about what's going to happen at all. They're about what we're experiencing now.

[Matt Novak]

The thing that they all have in common is change. Whether that's technological change or social change, people are concerned about what's right around the corner. And I think that's perfectly natural.

[Ben Bradford]

Matt says predictions of the future often say more about our current hopes and fears. Go back to those robot futures. With that Lens, it's the 1920s. Technology is moving so fast. Electricity, cars, assembly lines, mechanization. How could you know where it would end? Maybe in mech apocalypse as played out

[Matt Novak]

in rur, and you start to see the robot as this villain.

[Ben Bradford]

The 1930s, the Great Depression hits. People are losing jobs.

[Matt Novak]

The US had an unemployment rate peaking at like 25%. Of course people are going to be concerned about automation.

[Ben Bradford]

You know, worries of automation snowball into predictions of robot enslavement. On the other hand, that early utopian idea of mechanical men handling our labors, it was a glimmer of hope at a time. Labor laws were scarce. Factory work was brutal.

[Matt Novak]

Newspaper comics would, would have robot, you know, pre robot robot robots invented by Edison.

[Ben Bradford]

And then after the horrors of World War I, Matt says the role of mechanical men changed again to how they could rescue us from future combat.

[Matt Novak]

Robots would just be fighting and you wouldn't have any human casualties.

[Ben Bradford]

And it's an idea of what future war would look like.

[Matt Novak]

Yeah, exactly. And it would just be giant robots fighting each other. Whatever sized robots won, you just declared the winner. And there would be no human death. You know, I think it's people trying to grapple with the idea of how can we not experience the horrors of war and still declare a winner.

[Ben Bradford]

The robots are our friends when we're imagining technology improving our lives. And then there are enemies when we are worried that they're going to replace our jobs.

[Matt Novak]

Exactly. Exactly.

[Ben Bradford]

Looking back over a hundred years worth of robot utopias and doomsdays, it really does become clear how they stood in for the fears and hopes of their eras. By the way, there is one more clue. So many of these past visions were all supposed to take place at the same date. The floating cities of the Disney Horizons Ride, the Apocalypse of rur, probably the mini hippos, and so much more. If everyone was right, there'd be a lot happening in the year 2000.

[Matt Novak]

Like the year 2000 was this sort of magical number for these people. Well, myself included, actually. You know, I was born in the early 80s and, you know, the year 2000 still held some power then as a kid.

[Ben Bradford]

It was a symbolic number as so many predictions of the future have themselves been symbolic. Which then begs the question, can we apply this to our fears today? Are there doomsday concerns that we're investigating, which we'll look back on as phantasms spun from our current anxieties? Matt says to him there's an obvious one AI he feels like he's watching a rerun of RUR all over again.

[Matt Novak]

That story of a robot harming its master is getting played out again with this AI stuff. You know, the AI hype machine and the people who are trying to sell AI right now, who are telling us that this is technology that's going to has the potential to blow up the entire world. And I'm less convinced. I am not convinced.

[Ben Bradford]

I'm deep in that rabbit hole right now, I imagine. So. I personally do find AI, or at least the potential for it, pretty darn scary. But I will say it is reassuring to understand how common similar fears have been in the past. We've felt this way before and we've been way off. Maybe we're way off again. Either way, I think with what we've learned so far about futures past, we can upgrade our doom meter, our extremely sophisticated measuring tool here at the show for existential threats. We'll add more sensors to detect tunnel vision and dampers against threats that may really just be phantasms of our time. Maybe just maybe our general risk of doom is a tick lower than we might think. Now, with that said, there is one more past vision of doom that we need to discuss, one that really did seem inevitable. And I don't think it was just a matter of tunnel vision or current anxieties. It was real. It still is. It was nuclear war. And the lesson about why past predictions of Armageddon were wrong and what we can learn from them is really interesting. I think it holds the most crucial answer from our paleo future about how we need to view today's most dire threats. That's next.

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[It's Been a Minute Host]

Today, Every episode of It's Been a Minute. NPR's what's Happening in Culture podcast starts by asking three questions.

[Child Interviewee]

Who?

[It's Been a Minute Host]

How? Why now? If the culture's asking it, we talking about it at NPR. We stand for your right to be curious and indulge your cultural curiosity. Follow It's Been a Minute. Wherever you get your podcasts and we'll break down the zeitgeist y topics that are filling your feed.

[Ben Bradford]

In 1966, the BBC asked a group of school children what they thought the future would hold. What would they be doing in the year 2000? Of course, some of the answers were straight out of that Disney ride with robots and biodomes.

[Child Interviewee]

I think I'll probably be the spaceship to the moon dictating to robots. I think I'll be under sea.

[Ben Bradford]

A lot of their answers took a darker turn, though. The kids feared a population bomb. They were hearing about it from media and their parents.

[Child Interviewee]

People would all be squashed together so much there won't be any fun or anything.

[Ben Bradford]

But more than anything, these children were growing up not just fearing, but maybe expecting nuclear war.

[Child Interviewee]

All these atomic bombs will be dropping around the place and the whole world will just melt. Oblivion. There's nothing you can do to stop it.

[Ben Bradford]

Since the advent of the atomic bomb, nuclear war has been a constant fear and prediction. Probably that's obvious. Right here's our first world destroying weapons. We're pointing them at each other and we're scared of that. No kidding. And we should be. But what we might think less about is how that fear and expectation of what nuclear war would be and what it would mean would has changed over time. Matt Novak of Paleofuture points to a framed magazine cover behind him on the wall.

[Matt Novak]

It's from 1950, the COVID of Collier's magazine. It's got an illustration of Manhattan being destroyed with a nuclear mushroom cloud. It says, Hiroshima usa. Can anything be done about it?

[Ben Bradford]

And so basically Colliers is saying we are barreling 20 toward having our own Hiroshima here in the US and this

[Matt Novak]

is August 5th, 1950, the five year anniversary of Hiroshima being destroyed.

[Ben Bradford]

At the time, only two powers had nuclear weapons, the US and the Soviet Union. But the US had already dropped two in their short history. There was no record of restraint, of standing down in a major conflict, of having these devastating bombs and not using them. Matt says it felt inevitable.

[Matt Novak]

It really was an earnest fear that everyone would be dying in nuclear war.

[Ben Bradford]

But we didn't. But then more countries got the bomb. The uk, France, then China imagined projecting the future from there. Continued proliferation felt inevitable.

[Matt Novak]

There was an article that was syndicated by Newsweek's service in newspapers in 1969. It imagined many more nuclear powers by the year 2000. Like 50 nuclear powers.

[Ben Bradford]

50 nuclear powers. And like Chekhov's gun, surely once all these nuclear weapons were created, they'd have to be used on that scale. How could you ever prevent launches? You couldn't. And so the predictions of nuclear destruction began to change again. That Newsweek article tried to lay out how we could have nuclear war that

[Matt Novak]

wouldn't end the world, that you would have nukes that would not necessarily level an entire metropolitan area. You'd have a much more precise strike. These would be much more commonly deployed. So of course they'd have to be tactical, they'd have to be smaller.

[Ben Bradford]

Smaller tactical nuclear weapons do now exist. See our first episode. But few experts think you could lob one without sliding into full Scale, Armageddon. But people were grappling with a paradigm of easy access, not having yet imagined the political and social pressures, these other forces that would develop against their use.

[Matt Novak]

The way that I read it is that it was more of a rationalization.

[Ben Bradford]

And I would say also, you know, the only reason that we don't have, like why do we not have 50 nations that all have nuclear weapons? You know, if you're going back and projecting in the 1940s, you know, the US makes one and then, you know, very quickly the Russians have them. And I mean the, the only reason that we don't have a future where more nations have them is because of a lot of work by a lot of people and also the kind of the vagaries of history.

[Matt Novak]

You're absolutely right. We, we take for granted that our future was the inevitable one. But you know, if, if people hadn't put in the work to inhibits, say, proliferation of nuclear weapons. And I'm obviously, you know, I'm not an expert in nuclear proliferation, but I do, I do know for certain that the future is built. And that is to me one of the most important things in studying past visions of the future, that all of these are choices.

[Ben Bradford]

This is maybe the most crucial point, I think, that we can take away from our paleo future and apply now. It's easy to look back and laugh at the robot maids, aquatic cities, easy breezy nuclear war and mini hippos for pets, which would have been mean as hell and are worth ridicule. But viewed through another lens, predictions of nuclear war or even the population bomb, they weren't just misses, we made them wrong. With exhaustive decades spanning work to create arms treaties, non proliferation agreements, super wheat. And in that way, the paleo future is not always a record of things we just got wrong. It's also occasionally a fascinating glimpse into realities we may have had if we'd acted differently. Matt says that's the biggest lesson he's learned from his time digging through the past.

[Matt Novak]

I'm constantly thinking about the things I take for granted. There's a great quote from David Graeber, who was a writer who passed away a few years ago. You know, he said, the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. We need to step back and remember that none of this is inevitable.

[Ben Bradford]

We have a historical record of more than 100 years of people being worried about doom, often thinking it was right around the corner and they were wrong or they made it wrong. So I think the most hopeful lesson from all of this is really, especially if we work at it, we can be wrong too. Next time on our Are We Doomed? The Internet? Can we blow it up? We don't know how to exist in a pre Internet world anymore. If you think there's value in what you're hearing, please share this show with everyone. We're new and your good word is the absolute best way for even more listeners to find us and ensure we can keep doing this. And if you're really wanting to do more to help, you can become a [e-mail] support and get access to our bonus episodes and discuss with our burgeoning community and me. That's doompod.com support. Are we doomed? Is a production of Nuance Tales, created and run by me, Ben Bradford. Our producer is Lindsay Kilbride. Our editor is Tracy Samuelson, engineer and sound designer Jay Sebold. Our fully animated YouTube episodes at YouTube.comweDoomed pod are by Al Kamalassad, the music composed by Dylan Dagenet. The show is distributed by the NPR Network. Big thanks to Dan McCoy, Kalia Ali and the rest of the team at NPR for all they do. And most of all, thank you. You are making this worth.

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