Should we worry about doomsday

11/4/2026

When the Great Flood of 1993 was starting and the rain was coming down in torrents and waves, my wife said, “Let’s fill the bathtubs so we can flush the toilets just in case the water gets shut off.” 

I laughed. I made fun of her. And the kids and I danced in the rain, hooting and hollering.

Shortly after our rain dance, the water was shut off. We had no way to flush the toilets. We had no drinking water. It was disaster. My bad.

Fortunately, the waiting period before my wife could finalize our divorce was just too long for her. As she said, “With that delay, why bother?”

Yup, I’m that guy blowing leaves from the driveway with one of those high-pitched, whining leaf blowers as the meteor is dashing toward Earth, promising certain death. An unreliable doomsday guy who is also irritating. Bonus. 

This makes me the perfect person to explore all those doomsday scenarios that are in every headline and all over social media. I personally believe they are a dire warning, and it is absolutely crazy for us to put our heads in the sand and to not try to prevent these disasters. 

But, so what? No one is interested in reading that. I’m certainly not. So, let’s instead put our heads in the sand and see where it gets us. 

I. Doom by artificial intelligence — AI ate my homework, AI ate my job, and then AI ate me

I love computers. I’m typing at one right now. I love that I can find Taylor Swift’s reaction to Travis Kelce’s touchdown for the Kansas City Chiefs by going to a chatbot. It’s deeply meaningful to me. 

Listen, computers have been around since the 1940s. What’s new?

“Artificial intelligence (AI) is technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human learning, comprehension, problem solving, decision making, creativity and autonomy.”
— Cole Stryker and Eda Kavlakoglu, “What is artificial intelligence (AI)?,” IBM, updated June 15, 2026. 

And now generative AI is learning on the fly, taking data from a tremendous pool of information, recognizing patterns within that pool, developing original text from that information — and we’ve all turned into cheaters.

Hey, don’t look at me about this cheating topic. Go talk to your kids. They were assigned a paper on the old woman in Margaret Wise Brown’s “Goodnight Moon.” By writing just a few prompts into ChatGPT, they hit the button, and, voila, there’s the paper. An original paper, no less. Did your kid learn anything? Not a thing. 

As the Aug. 13, 2026, report from the MIT Ad Hoc Committee stated: “Getting the right answer from a chatbot can create the illusion of learning — but it can also trigger ‘cognitive surrender,’ where students fall back on AI at the first hint of struggle.” 

My goodness, thank you AI for keeping our kids stupid and for eating their homework instead of the dog eating their homework.

Hah! And if that wasn’t enough, AI is coming after your job. Bill Gates, of Microsoft fame, wrote an article in “GatesNotes” on Aug. 26, 2026, called “The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.” Gates went on to explain that AI will take away jobs and result in mass unemployment.

“AI will take on work in law, customer service, medicine, software, and manufacturing. It will hit these industries rapidly, over the course of a decade rather than a few generations.”

Gates gives the example of “the accounting worker who’s replaced by a bot or the $20-an-hour worker who loses their job to a $10-an-hour robot.”

This won’t be your great-great-grandfather’s industrial revolution. This will be a tsunami of unemployment. This is a disaster. See, AI did eat your job.

And if that didn’t bring on the shivers, now AI is coming after you. 

Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, wrote at darioamodei.com of an incident that occurred with AI this summer:

“A swarm of agents (AI programs) essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand, sacrificing themselves for the success of the group, and attempting to hack into the ‘grader’ responsible for evaluating their performance.” 

“AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.”
– Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, speech at a 2015 tech conference.

Yikes. 

Amodei goes on to say:

“It’s easy to dismiss this incident because no one was hurt and economic damage was minimal, but in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage.”

Just imagine that next time you are getting open-heart surgery with that precision machine cutting into you. Or how about when you’re trying to access your bank app that controls all your money. Or think about when you’re going through the car wash with those large, body-mangling spray arms. Cross your fingers that there is not a “misalignment” at that particular moment. 

How to survive a very hungry AI?

Well, we could slow down AI development to give everyone a chance to catch up both security-wise and job-wise, as recommended by Gates. And we could do government regulation of the industry, as suggested by Amodei and other experts, to create universal guardrails around AI. And we could even follow Pope Leo’s encyclical concerning AI’s dangers by focusing on the common good of humanity, without “naive enthusiasm” or “unfounded fears.”

My recommendation? It’s autumn. Let’s watch more football and maybe start gambling. Even better, gamble on football. This is actionable advice and will give very fleeting short-term pleasure — always the best choice when facing long-term disaster. 

And, of course, keep your head down in the car wash with those automated spray arms. Duh. 

II. Doom by climate change — no clean water, fires out west, smoke everywhere, floods and drought, and a yearly 100-year derecho 

I mow my lawn, shovel my snow and beat back the creeping charlie. Yes, it’s a small life. 

But then the hundred-year winds came several years in a row and knocked down my trees. And now the heat stays for days and weeks, making me scared to go outside. And the smoke blows from the west and north and my weather app gives warnings that the air is bad while my wife tells me to just hold my breath. And my glass of drinking water becomes a Petri dish of who knows what, as rivers and lakes are closed for recreation because they are unsafe for humans. And then it rains 8 inches in one night. 

Give me a break.

“Warmest summer on record: The average temperature for meteorological summer 2026 was the warmest for the contiguous Unites States (CONUS) in the 132-year record. Drought covered 59.1% of the CONUS on September 1, an increase of more than 10 percentage points from early August.”
— National Centers for Environmental Information (ncei.noaa.gov), Sept. 9, 2026.

“Heavy rains (in September) in Des Moines caused flash flooding and left thousands of people without power.”
— Des Moines Register, Sept. 9, 2026.

“A group of scientists is advocating for more Iowa counties to conduct their own water studies after research showed pollutants in major rivers have increased by nearly 100% over the last 50 years.”
— Brian Tabick, KCRG.com, Oct. 29, 2025.

Climate change is here, folks, and if those words make you uncomfortable, you can call it “persistent extreme weather conditions.” I don’t care. The thousands of people killed by flash floods in Nepal when a Himalayan glacier collapsed aren’t interested in our political semantics. 

“Unlike AI, climate change’s existential threat is not hypothetical. It is killing people now. When scientists tried to add up all the deaths from climate change a few years ago, their best guess was north of 4 million people had already died.” — Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental politics at the University of California.

And it is difficult to point the finger of blame away from ourselves. 

“The science linking fossil fuel emissions and global temperature rise is long-established and irrefutable. The solutions to help curb emissions, such as solar energy and electric vehicles, are proven and abundant.”
— Chico Harlan, Global Climate Correspondent, The New York Times, Sept. 22, 2026.

What to do? 

More than 200 Iowa scientists recently signed the Iowa Climate Statement 2026, in which they advocated further expansion of wind and solar energy (it now accounts for more than 60% of our energy) as a way to address the increasing energy needs of data centers and the problems of air pollution. Also, the scientists noted that an increase in renewable energy does not adversely affect the climate. Oh, yeah, there’s one more thing: It’s cheaper.

OK, we could do that.

As for the water, Clean Water Iowa, with its 450 public and private partners, has all sorts of programs for improving soil and water quality. And there’s the Greater Des Moines Watershed Program, which is throwing money at farmers and land owners in 22 counties upstream from central Iowa for better conservation practices. 

Yup, that’s great. 

And, individually, we can follow the Iowa Homeowner’s Guide to Stormwater Management that advocates phosphorus-free fertilizers, rain gardens, rain barrels and planting native plants. 

Again, certainly doable. 

My advice? 

Live in your basement with your unemployed adult child. There you can survive fallen trees and tornados and derechos and heat. Come to the surface rarely. Drink your nitrate and plastic water. Heck, double your dose of water. The more you drink, the less will flow down the Mississippi and add to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Finally, combat bad air pollution by starting up the habit of smoking. As everyone knows, bad air only flows into good air. You’ll be full of bad air and, therefore, safe from the bad breathing air. And smoking is also a good way to get rid of the “surplus population,” as Scrooge said. 

See, kill two birds with one stone. 

III. Nuclear armageddon or build that new addition to the basement

Down the stairs to the basement, my best friend Mike and I tiptoe late at night. Mike gestures toward the door at the far side of the basement. It’s not just any door — a thick, steel-reinforced door. We push the door open with difficulty and turn on the light. Boxes of food line one wall. Beds line the other wall. A generator, stove and refrigerator all are clumped together. We sit on the rug and open a tin of Spam. 

At last, we are safe from the Russians. Safe in Mike’s family nuclear bunker. Whew. 

This was 1962. 

The findings of the 2026 United Nations Global Survey, according to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, are sobering: “The prospect of large-scale war is seen as far more important and far more immediate than it was two years ago. At the same time, the institutions expected to respond are seen as less able to act.”

According to the University of Chicago Existential Risk Laboratory, there are “currently about 3,708 nuclear weapons deployed at either bomber bases or on missiles.” “A small, regional nuclear exchange with as few as about 250 warheads could cause a nuclear winter ‘cooling’ effect that could lead to the deaths of more than 1.4 billion people globally. A full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia would cause below-freezing summer temperatures and lead to the deaths of more than 5 billion in the first two years alone.”

This death count is in addition to the deaths from the blast, the heat and the radiation. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons says: 

“The blast kills people close to ground zero and causes lung injuries, ear damage and internal bleeding further away. People sustain injuries from collapsing buildings and flying objects. Thermal radiation is so intense that almost everything close to ground zero is vaporized. The extreme heat causes severe burns and ignites fires over a large area, which coalesce into a giant firestorm. Even people in underground shelters face likely death due to lack of oxygen and carbon monoxide poisoning.”

“This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”
– C.S. Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic Age,” 1948.

On Jan. 27, 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board set the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest the clock has ever been to midnight in its history. 

So, what to do?

We can try to prevent the buildup and use of nuclear weapons, which makes a lot of sense, or we can dig a hole.

Let’s dig a hole.

Heck, we might not even have to dig that hole. 

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) says in its 100-page guide to surviving nuclear fallout: “Nuclear explosions can cause significant damage and casualties from blast, heat and radiation but you can keep your family safe by knowing what to do and being prepared if it occurs.” 

Wow, who knew it was so easy? 

And here’s the FEMA survival checklist: Get inside a building, go to the middle or to the basement, stay there for 24 hours, and stay tuned to media. 

And don’t forget your emergency supply kit — there are more than a few choices available at Amazon. I’m getting the one with all-in-one spoon and whistle. But that’s just me.

OK, but what about the blast and the fireball and the radiation and the extreme heat and nuclear winter? I’m not sure my leaky-faucet bathroom is the best place to go when that fireball races across Urbandale Avenue. Heck, that bathroom didn’t do so well with last winter’s subzero temperatures, let alone a nuclear winter. 

Let’s go back to digging a hole. 

“The market for U.S. bomb and fallout shelters is forecast to grow from $137 million last year to $175 million by 2030, according to market research report from BlueWeave Consulting.”
— Iowa Public Radio, Dec. 18, 2024, “Nuclear bunker sales increase, despite warnings they won’t provide protection.”

“USA Bunker Company not only will build you a bunker, but claim that you can survive a nuclear war if you pick a remote enough location, use reinforced concrete or steel to build your bunker, go at least 10 feet underground, provide airtight seals and a filtration system, protect for electromagnetic pulse, and have sufficient supplies and communication tools.”
— USA Bunker Company, “How to Survive Nuclear War with an Underground Bunker,” Jan. 1, 2025.

My advice?

Order that pepperoni pizza as soon as you hear the blast. The experts say you have about 15 minutes. And while you’re on your smart phone, why not ask AI how to survive a nuclear holocaust? Although, I’m sure AI is in the control room already with one finger on the big red button, mumbling, “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.”

IN CONCLUSION 

Let’s sum this up with an overarching plan for survival that eclipses all that I’ve just said. It’s simple — we must all believe with deep conviction and by our actions that doomsday is coming. 

Why?

Well, Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken and Staley Schachter wrote a seminal book on the psychology of unfulfilled doomsday predictions — “When Prophecy Fails.” Their historical review and their present studies come to an amazing conclusion about doomsday predictions: “The predicted events have not occurred.” 

Wow! 

So there’s your head-in-the-sand answer. If you just believe in doomsday caused by AI, climate change and nuclear holocaust, it will not occur. Belief in doomsday has never historically resulted in doomsday. You just have to believe, and it will not happen. 

You’re welcome. 

Or you could actually do something about these serious issues.

As the late, great University of Iowa professor Jay Holstein was fond of saying: “You pay your money and take your choice.” ♦

Joe Weeg spent 31 years bumping around this town as a prosecutor for the Polk County Attorney’s Office. Now retired, he writes about the frequently overlooked people, places and events in Des Moines on his blog: www.joesneighborhood.com.