Dr. Malcolm Craig is a Senior Lecturer in American history and self-identified role-playing game designer at Liverpool John Moores University. His current research, which he is turning into a book, is on tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs), particularly ones that take place in a post-apocalyptic or post-nuclear setting, and their relationship with the nuclear age. As someone who is also interested in post-apocalyptic role playing games on computers, but has very little first-hand knowledge about TTRPGs other than having read Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World (highly recommended), I thought it would be pretty interesting to chat with Malcolm about his research. I would note, for the benefit of the reader, that Malcolm is Scottish and has a Scottish accent. This is an excerpt from a longer interview, and has at times been mildly edited for clarity.

What was it that brought you to approach TTRPGs as a subject for academic study?

So I started on this by accident. I’ve played roleplaying games since I was a teenager, and that’s quite a long time ago now. But for my doctoral studies, I did a lot of work in traditional diplomatic history of nuclear proliferation. And during the COVID year, so about 2022, I kind of had a moment of clarity and decided I didn’t enjoy my research anymore, but I didn’t have a future research direction.

I was actually literally down in our basement where our boxes of old games are, and I found my old copy of Twilight: 2000, this post-apocalyptic role playing game from 1984, and I went, hmm. Loads of people have done stuff about kind of nuclear issues in books, films, television, video games, all that kind of thing. But participatory table-top role playing games haven’t really been covered. So I wonder if I can maybe do a wee project in this.

And it just kind of snowballed as I decided to do the oral history aspect of it, interviewing people about their experiences playing these games in the 1970s and 1980s, and how they did or did not relate this to the wider issues around — the nuclear threat, the Cold War, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So it snowballed into not just kind of an analysis of the games themselves and their historical context and how and why they were created, but also the oral history component, which has been really fascinating. Because you can’t study games without studying how they’re played. That would be kind of a pointless exercise — just talking about the games themselves without talking about how people played them and how people interpreted them and all that kind of thing.

And what I’m really interested in doing is investigating these games and their play as aspects of the kind of wider Cold War nuclear culture. My friend and colleague who works at University of Liverpool, John Hogg, wrote a book in 2015 called British Nuclear Culture, which is great. And he talks about the official and unofficial narratives of the nuclear age. And I’ve kind of really cottoned onto that.

These games and their play are these kind of unofficial narratives of the nuclear age, of fear of apocalypse, of dealing with the nuclear threat of interpreting the world around them. So it’s a fascinating insight into how certain individuals kind of considered the world around them and approached that world through play, or sometimes didn’t. Sometimes it was just fun.

I know a bit about table top roleplaying games — e.g., Dungeons and Dragons — but I’ve never really played one. With that in mind, tell me more about Twilight: 2000. What was it like, and what is its image of the post-nuclear world?

So in a traditional tabletop role-playing game, a group of people gather around a table. One person, often referred to as the “referee” or the “games master” or the “dungeon master,” will lead them through a pre-prepared kind of scenario or maybe semi-kind-of structured series of events. And people play different characters interacting with other characters, interacting with the environment around them and doing stuff. And these first generation role playing games that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s from the emergence of Dungeons and Dragons in 1974, were quite traditional. Combat was very central to these games. More pages were given over to combat rules than any other part of the game.

So Twilight: 2000 emerged in late 1984. And it was created by a game design studio in Illinois called Game Designers Workshop. And many of the individuals involved in this — Marc Miller, Frank Chadwick, Loren Wiseman, Thomas Mulkey — had military backgrounds. Vietnam was a really important kind of influence on their lives. And they saw a gap in the roleplaying games market, which was dominated by fantasy, was dominated by D&D. But they saw a gap in the market for a military role-playing game.

But it was a bit awkward to make it about Vietnam, or make it too close to the contemporary real world in that sense. So they decided to make it in this future war.

So the game itself was set in a future world of 2000, where, in the mid nineties, a war broke out between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It led to a nuclear confrontation and the characters, when you start the game, are all American soldiers who are now isolated, cut off from command, in Poland in the year 2000, after this war has taken place.

So essentially you are military personnel and you can now have this sandbox. You can now explore this post-apocalyptic Poland and do really what you want. There’s no limits on what you can do. And it was a great success. The game was easily the most successful of the military roleplaying games that emerged in the 1980s. There had been attempts to do it before. None of them achieved great market success, but Twilight: 2000, in comparative terms, was big. It sold about 100,000 copies in the first couple of years, which was big for a roleplaying game that wasn’t Dungeons and Dragons.

So it was very militaristic, you’re playing American military personnel and it’s set in this post-apocalyptic Poland, but it’s almost like a tabula rasa — it’s a blank space. It’s where you can exercise your imagination about what these mostly male characters in a post-apocalyptic world would get up to.

Where does it stand on the spectrum of post-apocalyptic imaginations? Is it grounded, or are we talking about super-mutants and giant radioactive ants?

It’s very much grounded in reality. It is essentially a modern military roleplaying game. It kind of eschews the ideas of cannibals, of radioactive zombies, of all that kind of thing. It is different from some of the other post-apocalyptic games that emerged in the same period, where you could bring in all of these things like, know, mutants and cannibals and people emerging from underground with laser eyes and all these kinds of things. So it’s very much grounded in the reality of of military simulations and wargames really, there’s a lot of, because GDW, the designers, came from a wargame design background.

One of the standard jokes about playing Twilight: 2000 was, “I’ve rolled up my gun, now I’ll create my character,” because your gun was more important.

The initial box sets had very thin reference books compared to a lot of roleplaying games, very thin books. And so you get very little detail on Poland. The Poland of Twilight: 2000 is no more real than Middle Earth. You’re given three pages of detail on post-nuclear Poland, but way more detail on tanks and rifles and artillery pieces and all of these kind of things. Even the map that you get is effectively useless. It doesn’t tell you anything about it.

And one of the interesting things about interviewing people who played this game in period, one of the first things they do would go down to the local library, and get atlases and encyclopedias and kind of Europe, maps of Europe and all that kind of thing to try and give a bit more depth and detail to their experiences of playing this game, to bring a bit more realism into it.

But in many ways, it’s a game of resource management. It has these kind of elements where, for example, there’s no petrol [gasoline] anymore, or it’s very, very scarce. So you have to distill alcohol to run your vehicles. And you spend hours doing this. The game master would make you forage for stuff to make the alcohol. And you would spend an entire evening with your friends working out how to distill alcohol. I mean, in many ways that’s a good idea, but for a game that’s not very exciting.

So there’s a lot of resource management going on to it. It does trend in some areas towards the a realist approach to the post-apocalyptic world, but in other areas it doesn’t. Like the characters are meant to be realistic, but they’re kind of Schwarzeneggerian in their ability to take damage and to deal with combat.

It sounds like it puts some interesting constraints on the imagination of what it means to live in a post-apocalyptic world.

One of the fascinating things to me about it, and many of the respondents I interviewed for the project also brought this up, was that there’s nothing in the basic rules of the game for rebuilding, for restarting civilization, for peacemaking. That just isn’t in there. It’s not part of the game. Yet, for a lot of people who are playing this game, that was the role they chose for their characters.

Sure, many people I interviewed would say, “we just drove around in a tank shooting things.” You know, that was it. But many people chose to play this game and instead said: we want to, you know, do good. We want to “restart civilization.” We want to protect people. All of these kinds of things. So people kind of interpreted the game in quite radically different ways.

You have the imagination of the game designer on the one hand, and you have imagination of the players on the other. It is interesting where they don’t align, no? In a computer game, the options for the player are typically much more restrained, but in a tabletop roleplaying game, there seems to be inherently more flexibility for the players to interpret the game, and its meaning, in a way that aligns with their own interests, values, and goals.

Yes, absolutely. It’s one of the great things that some of the people I’ve interviewed have shared with me. They’ve still got their old materials from playing these games and they’re very kindly photographed and sent me these old road atlases and maps from the 1980s that they’d photocopied in their local library and annotated. These artifacts are absolutely fascinating to see how people interpreted all this.

Twilight: 2000 also had a thread of supplements called “Going Home,” where you are American soldiers, and you get to this German port, and you’re gonna get the last ship back to the United States. And that transitions to a new kind of a different phase of the game where all the subsequent adventure modules really were focused on the US.

And that was interesting in and of itself, because there was almost an inbuilt assumption that going home was the ultimate aim of the game. It’s a game written by Americans, published by an American company. The vast majority of people buying the game lived in the United States. That’s all very explicable. For those of us on this side of the Atlantic, actually, that was kind of cool. You get to play in this post-apocalyptic United States, like all the films we’ve watched and all that kind of thing.

What are some other examples of games from this period that you’ve studied?

So a bit earlier, in the late 1970s, we see the very first post-apocalyptic roleplaying games. And a lot of people when asked would say that the first post-apocalyptic role-playing game is a game called Gamma World, which was produced by TSR, the people behind Dungeons & Dragons. But actually it was beaten to the punch by this incredibly obscure game, a game so obscure I don’t even have a copy of it, called The Realm of Yolmi. And all you need to know about that is the United States is ruled by an undead Walter Cronkite.

Anyway, about three months later, TSR produced Gamma World, which was based on some earlier ideas that they had. And Gamma World is almost the opposite of Twilight: 2000. It is this mad combination of a nuclear and biological war, hundreds of years into the future, and you can literally have a character who is a psychic rabbit with lasers for eyes. Or can play a walking Rhododendron bush, that can talk as well. Don’t ask me to explain any of this.

And this all exists in the detritus of American society from hundreds of years before. So one of the classic images from the game is one of these characters on the cover of a book using an old battered stop sign as a shield.

So it’s this utterly ludicrous gonzo take on the threat of nuclear war and what might happen after it with these, know, these crazy mutations and all these kinds of things. And it very much draws upon that particular and more phantasmagoric strand of science fiction from the like 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, where everything was mutants and cannibals and strange mutated animals.

It was a very, very different from Twilight: 2000. And you can see, if you look into the progression of these kind of games, that there’s a definite kind of bridge between the late 1970s, kind of gonzo stuff, but then you kind of bridge over in the early 1980s, where you get into the Reagan era, and you start seeing these harder-edged games like Twilight: 2000.

What’s your sense about where the bulk of these kinds of games fell, on a spectrum between the “gonzo” Gamma World and the “realistic” Twilight: 2000?

So plausibility and realism certainly dominated. Gamma World carried on in print for years. I mean, it was very popular. But it was one of the kind of you know, a stand out, because it would be very difficult to do another Gamma World. TSR had that market sewn up. They were the big dog in roleplaying games. but I think there was more of a leaning towards, especially when we get into the 1980s, when Twilight: 2000 proved there’s a market for the more realistic, militaristic games.

Since then, there’s much more of a tendency towards realism. So for example, you have games like The Morrow Project, whose book was deliberately designed to look like a US Army training manual. And in the back of it, it references Jane’s Infantry Weapons, and all of these huge list of American military manuals that were drawn on for the creation of this game.

The Morrow Project was kind of a bridge between say Gamma World and Twilight: 2000. You’re these “elites of society” who’ve been frozen for 150 years, and you wake up and, my God, there’s been an apocalypse. And you go out there and you’re going to rebuild civilization and recreate the world. And you think, this is all very hard-edged, and there’s a lot of stuff taken from modern military manuals, and all that kind thing. But there’s radioactive cannibal zombies and all that kind of thing and mutants and all these kind of things. So, The Morrow Project is an interesting kind of combination of that. It’s very like Fallout, a precursor to it.

And then you also have Aftermath, which is possibly one of the most complicated role playing games I have ever encountered in my life. It is really what was called in terms of rules, “crunch.” There is a lot of arithmetic and a lot of mathematics and a lot of numbers involved in it. But Aftermath was this kind of sandbox, which you allowed to create your own apocalypse. It didn’t just have to be nuclear. It can be environmental, could be alien invasion, all of these kinds of things.

And these games like Aftermath and The Morrow Project, they were very much more realistically grounded than Gamma World. And they’re kind of a bridge to Twilight: 2000. They weren’t huge successes. But then Twilight: 2000 demonstrated that there was a certain market you could make money from for this more hard-edged, realistic game play and their approach to the world, as opposed to trying to do another Gamma World. So realism was always much more on the agenda, it seems to me.

If you were going to pick one of these kinds of games to run with a group today — maybe a group of people your age now and not teenagers — what’s the game you would choose?

I don’t even need to think about that. It would be the 1986 classic, The Price of Freedom. It is fascinating. It posits a United States that was invaded by the Soviet Union. Here’s the blurb from the back cover:

A gutless president has been elected. America has signed international agreements prohibiting Star Wars defenses. The Soviet Union has developed a shield against nuclear attack. The Soviet premier demands American surrender. The president complies. Soviet troops are landing in your hometown. In this, it’s darkest hour, America needs heroes. Are you willing to pay... the price of freedom?

Brilliant. It is essentially Red Dawn, the roleplaying game. And it created a firestorm of controversy on this side of the Atlantic when it came out.

In the pages of the main gaming magazine, the UK’s White Dwarf, Twilight: 2000 created controversy over the themes — “is it appropriate to play a game set in your future nuclear apocalypse?” The Price of Freedom kicked off an even bigger firestorm because it was seen as jingoistic, ultra-conservative, everything that the people in the UK would just in a knee-jerk way think of when they thought about the United States and its worst aspects in this period.

But it was a joke! It was written by Greg Costikyan, the arch satirist of role-playing games. And Price of Freedom was a satire, but just he did it so straight-facedly that a lot of people just didn’t get the joke, didn’t see how, this was a pastiche of Red Dawn, of ultra-conservative fears of subversion in the United States, and everything.

And he has some brilliant little game rules in it that should have given you a hint. So in combat, American characters can never panic. Only the Soviets and their “quisling lap dogs” can panic in combat. Americans are always steadfast. But so few people got the joke because he did the satire so straight-faced. It’s all meant to be a gag.

You’ve also made your own games. Tell me about one of those.

So I’ll go with the post-apocalyptic one that I wrote, which is called Hot War, which is set in London in the winter of 1963, a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis went hot. It was a follow-up to a game I had written previously called Cold City, which was set in Berlin in 1950 and involved international occult monster hunting.

Hot War, though, was very much influenced by my teenage experiences playing games like Twilight: 2000. And I wanted to write a game that, rather than just provide the sandbox for driving around shooting things, emphasized the themes, for example, that come out of films like Threads, that the apocalypse is about human relationships, about community, about the breakdown of society. So that was very much embedded in the experience of play in Hot War.

You can go through an entire game of Hot War and there’s never any physical combat. It can take place, but it’s not central to the play experience. It’s much more about how individuals and groups cope with the abject collapse of society while trying to keep some aspects of society together. So that was very much my intention influenced by my teenage years of playing certain kinds of games and emphasizing those themes because that’s what I enjoy. That’s what I enjoy in games. I’m not really interested in sitting there rolling dice for a firefight these days. I may have enjoyed that as a teenager, but not now.

I wrote Hot War back in 2008, but now there’s a second edition of it, which I’ve just finished working on, which is based on the best part of a couple of decades of greater experience. In 2008, I wasn’t an academic, I’d not done my master’s, I’d not done my PhD. So I’ve been able to go back to it and both improve the gameplay and also improve the historical underpinnings of it.

Games aren’t textbooks and they shouldn’t be treated as such. But I also like it to have an educative aspect that will tell people a little something that maybe they didn’t know about Britain’s Cold War experiences. So I’ve embedded a lot of that into the game itself. So for example, in the game mechanics, there’s something called “breakdown,” which is, the breakdown of society, and that can influence what happens in the game. And “breakdown” is the word that was used in British government documents of the period to describe the collapse of society as well. So it’s drawing very much on the documentary evidence, like the Strath Report of 1955.

Do you feel your work studying, making, and playing these kinds of games has changed how you conceptualize something like nuclear war and its aftermath?

I don’t know if it’s changed what I think about it. I mean, certainly, I also think it’s about what would you do?

I mean, going back to my childhood, I grew up just up the hill from Grangemouth Oil Refinery, which was in the 1980s, which was the biggest oil refinery in the UK, one of the biggest in Europe. And we all knew, growing up, that it was a major target. It was gonna get hit.

We had Grangemouth Refinery and then just on the other side of the river was the Rosyth Naval Dockyard. And then on one side of us we had Edinburgh, the other side we had Glasgow. We were going to be dead in the event of a nuclear war.

I’ve been going through the British government documents and some of it is, as you’ll know yourself, it’s just so outlandish and so at odds with the way that things would actually transpire. In many ways, it makes me a bit more fatalistic. I think things would actually be a lot worse than people expect them to be. I’m more of the Threads kind of thinking, like, things are gonna be really bad, and hopefully it never happens!

Cheryl Rofer has been a friend of mine for many years now. She worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1965 until 2001 in a number of roles, including working on laser isotope separation, environment cleanup and hazardous waste disposal, and worked with Estonia and Kazakhstan to clean up environmental problems left by the Soviet Union. She lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for many years, and is the best nuclear tour guide over there that I know. She actively posts at Nuclear Diner and Lawyers, Guns, and Money. I thought it would be important and interesting to ask her about her time at the lab, and especially on being a woman at the lab in the high Cold War.

When did you start working at the lab and why? Why there out of all places?

Okay, well, this was back in 1965, and things were really different in 1965. So the simple answer is that my husband got a job at Los Alamos and I went along.

He was a ceramic engineer, and he was hired to work on the fuel elements for the Rover rocket reactor. I had a master’s degree in chemistry. I have never been a great fan of school and I dropped out with a master’s degree. Which was probably a mistake, although ultimately it worked out good enough.

There was just a whole lot I did not know about a career and all of that. But the night before we reached Los Alamos, we stayed in Santa Fe. And I cried because I didn’t know what my future was going to be.

Was there any discussion about him taking the job at Los Alamos?

Not really. That was very much assumed at the time. And the 1960s were just what is now an incredible time for people in science getting jobs. I mean, we did the grand tour. Several corporations in various places paid for both of us to come for interviews.

I remember going to Connecticut, I think it was United Technologies, and we went to Los Alamos, and there were probably a couple of others. And that was just the way it was back then. The companies had a lot of money for science graduates and they were bringing us out there.

Now, being the trailing spouse, for some of these interviews, it was just a matter of I was there, and I wasn’t part of it. But I do remember the United Technologies interview, because the wife of the person who was interviewing my husband toured me around and said, “now this is the part of town you would live in.” [laughs]

I had also applied for a technician job at Cutter Pharmaceuticals. And what they said was, you were the best applicant for the job, but the man you’d be working with can’t see working with a woman. So that’s how it was back then.

So then you also were at Los Alamos.

You know, one of the subsidiary good things about the Lab was that they had this ethos of hiring the spouses as well, which was left over from the Manhattan Project. It was easy when I got to Los Alamos for them to slot me into a technical writing job because I was a wife and that was the kind of job I had had before. So I got a job in one of the reactor groups. This was a group that was mainly calculational, and they were working on things like loss of coolant accident. So that was actually good in a way because I learned a whole bunch about reactors.

In the 1960s, Norris Bradbury was trying to turn the lab around a little bit, so that it wasn’t exclusively working on weapons. They were working on geothermal energy, and there was also some interest in solar, and of course, they had the Rover [nuclear rocket] program.

But around 1970, there was a real crisis at the lab, because reactor programs were just being stopped across the Department of Energy. And this is kind of an interesting time that hasn’t really received a lot of attention. I did a little bit of research on it and it turned out that the person who was in charge of reactors at the Atomic Energy Commission decided that we didn’t have enough uranium and so we needed to focus on breeder reactors. So he cut out everything else that was being done on the reactors, and that included Rover. It included what the group I was with was doing in terms of loss of coolant accidents. And it just stopped overnight.

It was the first big shock to the laboratory in terms of losing money. People were really displaced. My group was dead, but my group leader very kindly — he thought anyway — got me a job in one of the explosives groups as a technical writer. And about that time, I was getting a little bit tired of that. And I was sharing an office with a young man who had a bachelor’s in chemical engineering, and he was getting to do fun things and I was getting to do documents.

So I quit and I put my attention to developing a chapter of NOW at Los Alamos.

This is the National Organization of Women?

Right. This was in the days of consciousness raising and we had consciousness raising groups. And Harold Agnew [the director after Bradbury] was really not happy at all to have a chapter of NOW in Los Alamos, because he felt it was doing everything right, that the lab was perfectly fair — because it hired wives as well as husbands.

I mean, you know, people just had, a particular mindset back then, which is different from what we expect now.

Anyway, so I was out of the lab for a couple of years, and then I decided that if I was going to be a scientist, I guess it was going to have to be at the lab. My husband was still working there.

They were developing a laser division, which was looking at both laser fusion and laser isotope separation. And there was a job advertised that looked perfect for me, but it was in my husband’s group. And back then they had nepotism rules that prevented putting husbands and wives in the same group. So I couldn’t apply for that.

But they did have an Equal Opportunity Officer by then, and so my husband and I went to him and we said, well, we’re going to have to get a divorce. And he said, he said, “would you live together?” And we said, yes — which was not done back then. And he said, “don’t do anything.” And within a few days, the University of California [who managed Los Alamos] no longer had the same nepotism rules, which was kind of convenient.

It was Bob Bussard who hired me. This is Bob Bussard of the Bussard Drive. He was the deputy division leader. And he was kind of a wild man. And he said, when he hired me, I’d rather have you working for me than against me.

So that was how I got into the laser division and started doing some cool things. I was in the systems analysis group and we did a little bit of lots of things and that was a lot of fun.

What exactly made you feel that Los Alamos needed a chapter of NOW in the 1970s?

Everybody needed chapters of NOW then. It was just a thing.

They were quite happy to have me as a technical writer, despite the fact I had a master’s degree in chemistry. There were also little things like that.

I can remember one colloquium, with one of their famous biology guys on trips to Mars, spaceships to Mars, because that was what the Rover reactors were for. So he’s talking about space flight to Mars and possible radiation doses. And of course, he added, we’d need to have some women along on the trip because ha ha ha ha, you know why. And I wrote a little note to Norris Bradbury about that. He was not pleased. But it was, you know, just really unpleasant and denigrating and kind of indicated a bad attitude.

And then a little later, after Bob Bussard had hired me back in, I was doing these experiments with plutonium and uranium. This was when they still had the DP site plutonium facility. They had only a men’s change room, but they said they were going to have a women’s change room and they were going to have it soon. They were working on it and they were working on it. And I wanted to do the experiment and I would have to of course change and do the experiment in a glove box. And so there was going to be a women’s change room and it just didn’t keep showing up. So I stood outside the men’s change room one day and said, “well, I guess I’m going to have to change in the men’s change room.” And the next day they had a women’s change room set up.

So, you know, it was just the usual drag that everybody had back in the time.

I was told by a secretary that there was one person who complained a lot and this was a former Manhattan Project person that I was working with my husband in the lab. And he was probably the one who put a little note in my personnel file that I was thought to be a communist agent. This was before there were safeguards put on what could go into personnel files.

Do you feel like the things with discrimination or even just attitudes, it sounds like you’re saying that the lab was not particularly an outlier one direction or the other. Do you feel that that’s fair?

Yeah, I think that’s fair enough.

There were some women at the lab and they were really good to me. When we had our orientation, when I just started at the lab, we went down to a reactor which is no longer there, but there was a woman operator at the reactor and of the group she said to me, here, you stand in front.

There was some solidarity among the women. And then there was another woman who was a physicist who made a point of saying, “hello, Cheryl,” to me. And I don’t know how she knew who I was. But it was a smaller lab and kind of everybody knew everybody. So I would not be surprised if she was aware that there was a new woman in the group of new employees.

Yeah, I think it was not an outlier in either direction. It was not great, but it was not the worst.

So you ended up working on lasers.

The laser division reorganized a lot. So I would continue in more or less the same job, but the designation of the group I was in would change.

And at some point, we split into a laser fusion division and a laser isotope separation division, which split the systems group pretty much down the middle. And I went to the laser isotope separation division, where I managed to get into experimental work.

What we were trying to do was molecular laser isotope separation using uranium hexafluouride (UF6), hitting it with lasers. There were some things we believed at first that turned out not to be true, like that you could excite UF6 molecules in some sort of selective way that would make them react in a particular way. Now it turns out that in a normal gas, you just have too much activity and the laser excitation goes away really quickly, much too quickly to produce a reaction. And so that was something that we struggled with. But one of the things I did was I got a really good ultraviolet spectrum of UF6, probably the best one that was available at that time. And I was working with my husband at this time in the lab. It was a start for me to actually be doing real science, and get publications and that kind of thing. And we did some cool things.

The lab was able at that time to do a lot of things that weren’t just narrowly focused on specific objectives. I wasn’t involved in the budget at this time, so I don’t know for sure it worked this way, but working backwards from what I know about budgeting of the lab, they must have gotten kind of a big chunk of money for the laser isotope separation program. And then I think there was a lot of latitude with how they could allocate that money. Just generally, there was a philosophy at the lab that doing additional work besides the particular objective was a good thing to do.

And that goes back to the Manhattan Project, too. Because from the Manhattan Project on they did a lot of chemistry, for example, of the actinides, because we didn’t know what it was. And you don’t know ahead of time how much of that will be relevant to what you’re doing and how much won’t. So doing more is better than doing less, because you might find something really cool. And there were times when they did.

We did an interesting little photochemical thing that had to do with nuclear reprocessing. And that is that in nuclear reprocessing, you have to reduce the plutonium from +4 to +3. And the way we did that was we reduced the uranium using ultraviolet light, and then the uranium reduced the plutonium. And we got a patent on that. Except that was about the time that the United States was deciding they weren’t going to do nuclear reprocessing. So, well.

It sounds like it was a relatively fluid environment, in terms of topics to work on.

I think there are changes now, but I’m not close enough to know about it. But the culture basically was you come in, and this was 1965, and you’re told, okay, you get a Q clearance, you are a staff member, and this was true even for me, a technical writer. And if we need to go back to some kind of program where we are working only on weapons, you will work only on weapons, this is the agreement that you are making with us. You have this job now, but that could change and you will change with it or leave. Which, you know, seemed like a fair deal to me because in 1965. We still had a pretty wild cold war going on.

So that was the agreement that you came into. But there was also an assumption that if you could get something going, that was a good thing too. And as I said, Bradbury in particular wanted to diversify the lab into peaceful research as well.

So there would be these programs and you could move easily from one to another. I think the funding was much more modular than it is now. And it was funding for this program and the lab gets to make a lot of the decisions on that program. By the time I left, that was no longer the case and Congress was deciding down to how much money my project would get. And so that has changed entirely.

But so the lab had this modular structure of programs, and you could move from one program to another. So my graduate training was in organic chemistry. But I wound up doing spectroscopy and building lasers and reaction kinetics and ultimately cleanups and plutonium chemistry. So there was a lot of room to do a lot of different things.

But the laser isotope separation program was probably one of the last of those really modular programs. And the lab was moving to more of a university structure where you have a professor and their postdocs and associated people. And it’s much smaller units. I don’t think it was a good thing.

How would you have felt if you were told you had to do weapons work? Did you give this thought?

Well, when I was was in the explosives group, that was obviously for weapons. I was only there for a couple of years. It didn’t particularly bother me, but I was just mainly doing documents and… it was OK with me.

I was lucky in getting into other kinds of programs as time went on. I eventually got a job in the Environmental Restoration Project, and I was managing cleanups of the land. And that connected me up with some people in Estonia who were cleaning up a former Soviet yellowcake plant.

And I enjoy doing projects where we get something done and find the answers to problems. We and the Estonians cleaned up a tailings pond that was a kilometer long and a half a kilometer wide right on the Baltic Sea. And I helped them do that. And I feel pretty good about that.

One last question: You were in your late teens when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened. What was that like?

I was in college, yes. I had mono. I was in the college infirmary and my roommate came over and told me what was happening and I thought, I don’t care if the world comes apart because I feel so miserable now, it would just be the right thing to happen. [laughing] But it was very frightening.

At a workshop last summer, I was got to talking with Zachary Schrag, a professor of history at George Mason University who has written a number of books, including the history of the Washington, D.C., Metro system, and, most recently, nativist riots in antebellum Philadelphia. At the workshop, we spoke about various nuclear matters, and he was sharing some of his memories with me about growing up in Washington, DC, during the Carter Administration. His father, Philip Schrag, is a professor at Georgetown Law, and was the deputy general counsel of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and a board member at Council for a Livable World. I thought it would be interesting to talk to both of them about their different generational experiences regarding nuclear war, and so I asked them both to allow me to interview them simultaneously.

Zachary: So I think I am generationally unusual in that a lot of Americans who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s had civil defense drills, had fallout shelters, had big scares like the Cuban Missile Crisis. And for most people of my generation born in 1970, that was less of an obvious presence.

We still had relic fallout shelter signs on some buildings. I remember one summer camp, one of the trash cans had instructions for how to use it in a fallout shelter. But I don’t think that most of my friends knew much about nuclear weapons. And I was unusual in that I did.

My father, starting in 1977, was trying to negotiate a nuclear test ban. He taught me and my brother a fair amount about the threat to us about things like intercontinental ballistic missiles and MIRVs and fallout and all of these kinds of things. And when he first took the job in the Carter administration, that was not terribly alarming because while there was this big problem out there that could kill us all, it was very clear that my father was going to fix it and we would live in safety ever after.

And then at some point, probably around 1979, it became clear that things were not going according to plan. You had the Iranian hostage crisis. You had the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. You had Carter’s decreasing popularity. And I became quite afraid that Ronald Reagan was going to win the presidency and lead us into nuclear war and we would all die. And worse than that, I thought we would die very horribly and painfully.

We did not have the World Wide Web and fancy sites like yours telling us how exactly we would die. But there were plenty of maps at the time. And for someone growing up five miles from the White House, I knew that I would be burned to death, which seemed pretty unpleasant. So again, this was, I think, for the most part, not well known among my peer group until 1983 when The Day After aired on national television, at which point my friends maybe caught up a little bit with me and my knowledge and fear.

Philip, how do you feel hearing your son talk about this?

Philip: Well, this is kind of a recapitulation of my own childhood experience. I was born in 1943 and grew up with the bomb. In about 1950 or 1951, I was in the third grade and all the Soviets had gotten the bomb and my classmates were scanning the skies for the Soviet bombers that were going to come and get us. There were air raid sirens up in our town and drills from time to time. And whenever the siren went off, I would become terrified.

And then in the third grade, there was a really big drill in which the teachers had to walk everybody home from the elementary school. And dropping off each in the group, dropping off each kid at his home. I lived the furthest from the school. So the teacher had to walk miles to all these houses to get to my house. And poor Mrs. Artister was very tired by this time she got to my house and my mother invited her in for a drink, which she gratefully accepted.

The experiences continued because there were drills all through junior high school. We had to go to the basement of the school. This was a few miles from New York City. So I knew even in the third grade that I would die if there was a nuclear war. And in the basement of the school, all of us knew that we would die and that this was a very silly thing.

It wasn’t until about high school though that we got the idea that we could express ourselves about how silly this was. And we started wearing black armbands in the basement drills to show our disaffection from the grownups’ efforts to calm us. This led to a series of actions on my part. One was that in the 10th or 11th grade, I was an amateur radio operator, and I joined our local civil defense group. And I have a little pin to show for it.

We had exercises in which — these were all high school students doing this — in which a group of people would hide a radio transmitter somewhere and pretend to be Soviet spies. And the others of us with portable receivers and homemade antennas made out of coat hangers would try to triangulate the location of the hidden transmitter and nab the spies. And the person who nabbed the spies became the spies the next month.

When it was our turn to be the spies, we actually dressed up as women and hid the portable transmitter in a baby carriage, and we were wheeling it down the streets. And finally, we were caught. But that was quite an adventure.

When I graduated from high school, my nuclear interests continued. And I joined Harvard College’s anti-nuclear group called Tocsin. And Tocsin led a nationwide march in February 1962. There were college students from all over the country who converged on the White House. And President Kennedy sent coffee out to all of us. And that made the front page of The New York Times the next day.

But there was a more serious effort as part of it. It wasn’t just marching. Individual, small groups of students were designated to meet with the leaders of US nuclear policy and try to argue sense into them — that nuclear war had to be prevented and not fought, that fallout shelters were a silly idea because we were all going to die in our fallout shelters. And there were, of course, stories about how people would shoot each other to get into their fallout shelters, and so forth.

My particular small group was designated to meet with Jerome Wiesner, Kennedy’s science advisor, in the Executive Office Building, in his office, and argue with him. And I was part of that delegation. It was the first time I entered the old Executive Office Building, and I was a student protester. We met with Wiesner, and did not change his mind.

And that was the last time that I entered the federal Executive Office Building until about 15 years later, when I was the Deputy General Counsel of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and had many meetings in that building trying to affect federal policy to stop nuclear testing, just as I had 15 years earlier as a protesting college student.

I'm struck by how, in both of your stories, you’re both describing having these very foundational experiences about nuclear fears: Philip, your reaction to the civil defense drills with the feeling that these are not going to do anything; and Zachary, you go from this position initially feeling confident, and then having this loss of confidence come in. How much did these fears shape your life paths?

Philip: It certainly affected mine. I was terrified as a high school student, and wanted to do something about the fact that everybody was terrified. And so when I got to college, I actually wrote my undergraduate thesis on nuclear negotiations that led to the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, which occurred while I was in college, increased my commitment to working in this field, although when I graduated from college and went to law school and graduated from law school, I didn't have an opportunity to work in the field because Nixon had been elected and there was little prospect that he was going to stop nuclear weapons testing or sign a nuclear weapons testing ban. So it wasn’t until Carter was elected that I actually had a chance to do something about this.

Zachary: And for my part, my anxiety peaked in the early 1980s and then diminished after Gorbachev came into office. And my experience again in high school and college was of one amazing thing happening after another, i.e. Gorbachev's initiatives. I was looking up some dates. It’s 1990, I believe, that an SS-20 shows up in the Air and Space Museum in downtown Washington. So, you know, one of the missiles I'd been afraid of is now there and is literally a museum relic.

I remember reading my senior year of college in 1991 that Boris Yeltsin had officially stopped targeting missiles at the United States. So I’d lived, again, aware since childhood that a Soviet missile was pointing at me at all times. And obviously I knew those missiles could be retargeted, but even the idea that Yeltsin was not actively trying to target and possibly kill me was a big deal! You know, again, in terms of my nightmares and psychological state.

The first Gulf War in 1990, where again, the Soviet Union under Gorbachev stood back, suggested that the US-Soviet rivalry was not central. And I actually ended up living in Russia for six months in 1993 after the collapse of Soviet Union. And, you know, obviously the Russian threat is back, but at the time it was a very hopeful time. So I did not feel I had to try to give my own life to nuclear disarmament.

What specifically do you both think, having both been made to fear nuclear war as children, about the value of, to put it bluntly, scaring children about such risks? There’s an argument that could be made that, whatever the value of Civil Defense from a practical standpoint, that it made the issue of nuclear war very “salient.”

Zachary: I had this weird fortune of not having any drills. I was too young for the nuclear drills and too old for the active shooter drills and so, you know for all of that I still had a fair amount of terror and nightmares. So I don't quite know what to say for that. I think that what I've read about the active shooter drills is that they provide kind of all the trauma our schoolchildren need without adding to that and it has not turned them into activists against assault rifles. Some of them, obviously, yes, but we still have a lot of assault rifles in this country. And so I’m not sure if that sense of terror is as productive as we might wish. Again, my sources of terror were more the artistic representations.

Nan Randall's Charlottesville story,1 which I pulled off, I think my father’s shelf around 1981, gave me very deep nightmares. My mother once told me that the book that I was most afraid of as a child was a book called Zeralda's Ogre by Tomi Ungerer. And she couldn’t understand if that was the scariest book, how the Charlottesville story could also be the scariest. And if you look at Zaralda's Ogre, it’s got this spread of the ogre coming to town, and all the children hiding in the basement, much like a fallout shelter. So in fact, they’re the same terror for me, this cannibalistic ogre and the nuclear weapons. Either way, you're trying to hide your children in the cellar, and someone's coming from you. And I learned many years later that Tomi Ungerer spent his childhood in Nazi occupied Alsace. So he had his own trauma to transmit.

I think, I guess my conclusion is that there’s plenty of trauma to go around. And whether it’s climate change or active shooters or nuclear threat, if we were really to “sensitize” our children to all the things that could not only kill them, but destroy the world around them, we would not have very effective children anymore.

Philip: Zachary, I'm so sorry that I wrecked your childhood twice, both with Zaralda's Ogre, and with the threat of nuclear war.

Zachary: Well, it's always something. I would not let my children read any Tom Ungerer. But I read to them The Wolves in the Walls by Neil Gaiman, and apparently that traumatized my kids just as effectively. Yeah, there’s going to be something that you think is a kid’s book and it turns out to be just a nightmare.

Philip: I don't think that nuclear weapons drills would be meaningful in today’s world. For one thing, there are two much more present and obvious threats to the survival of mankind as a species right now, like climate change and the increasing number of epidemics and pandemics. Even if the government or somebody encouraged nuclear weapons drills now, I don’t think anybody would participate. I think there’d be protests and jokes about them.

Given the challenges and threats the world faces, how do you guys cope?

Philip: I cope by doing a little bit of work with the National Center for Arms Control and Disarmament and the Council for Livable World. But other than that, I feel like there’s not much I can do either. I’m certainly not gonna hide in my basement.

Zachary: I have not found much of a way to address climate change. I am writing again about mass transit, which theoretically could help us find less energy intensive ways to live, though the more I do the research, the more pessimistic I grow about that. Again, I have succeeded in passing trauma onto at least one of my children, and maybe can continue with my nephew. My son is weirdly well adjusted, so I may have failed there. But in terms of telling my children that I am giving them a broken world and hoping that they can do more to fix that than I have.

One of the difficulties in talking with young people about these things is that if you don’t have some way to make them feel like they have agency, it easily encourages fatalism.

Philip: Well, in the United States, unlike many countries, we do have a way to exercise agency. And it’s not just by voting. It is by contributing money to candidates who have some solutions to these problems and knocking on doors in political campaigns and running for office oneself. It’s possible for people in younger generations to become activists and get politically involved. Politics is our way in a democratic society to affect social change more effectively than simply recycling your plastics.

Zachary: I would chime in with the classic Jewish wisdom that you are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it. And I think that does give us some time for Netflix in the evenings if we've tried to do something. And I find that with my own students, there is a certain amount of techno-optimism that they have, that maybe they can figure out better ways to do this. Some of that I fear is misplaced. But for all of the laments that we humanists have about the lurch into science and engineering fields among young people, I think at least part of that is that those young people are hoping to gain the tools not just to enrich themselves, but to repair some of the world.

For my inaugural interview, I am really pleased to be talking with Nasser Zakariya, an historian of science who is a professor in the Rhetoric department at University of California, Berkeley. Nasser and I have known each other for exactly 20 years, as members of the same graduate program cohort. Nasser is the author of A Final Story: Science, Myth, and Beginnings (University of Chicago Press, 2017), a history of the way in which scientists have sought to create sprawling narratives about the long past, and possible long future, of the universe.

I was talking to him about Doomsday Machines the other day and it brought to mind to him an idea by the physicist J. Richard Gott that is sometimes referred to as the “delta-t,” which, in some forms, involves to trying to quantify a statistical answer to the question: “How much time will our civilization survive?”

I thought this would make for an interesting conversation, so I cajoled Nasser into letting me record an interview with him. What follows is an abridged excerpt below that is edited for readability. My input/questions are in bold. Paid subscribers will have access to an audio recording of of the interview that contains some material not included below.

So, Nasser, the other day, I brought up the end of the world (as I often do), and you were telling me about this thing called the delta-t. Can you, can you tell me what that was again?

In 1989, an astrophysicist named Gott at Princeton in Nature published an argument that in effect says something like: you can, take a guess — a strong guess — of the likelihood of how long any phenomenon will last into the future on the basis of how long it's lived to the present. He claims that he came up with this in the 60s when he visited the Berlin Wall. And he sees the Wall and asks how long it might persist. And he in effect decides that, well, I'm not in any way extraordinary. But, he asks, what constitutes extraordinary? For him that would mean coming at some sort of notable time in the duration of the existence of the wall.

So he then says, let me say that I'm probably somewhere in the midpoint of its existence. And then he says, if that’s true, then it's likely therefore to last X number of years. So he basically establishes a 95% confidence interval — a very standard technique in statistics — to say something like: the duration of the wall from this point forward is anywhere from a few months to a couple hundred years, something like this. Because it turns out to be 1/39th of the duration to the present, up to 39 times that same duration.

If this is in the 1960s, then this is only a few years after the Wall goes up, right? If he was there in its first year, he’d be 1/39th of a year, which is not that long, or it’d be 39 years. Right?

Yes, exactly. And you can see that that interval would get bigger and bigger as the duration itself got bigger and bigger, as time went on.

He said that he had told this to a friend in the 1960s, early on when he was starting graduate school. And then, when the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, as he saw it his prediction had been confirmed. This is how he states it, at least. He refers to this as an application of the Copernican principle, and he treats it as a kind of wisdom of science generally that what has it taught us, it has taught us at all times to make sure that we don't see ourselves as exceptional.

I can see the logic of this. I can also see that by itself, there are obvious fallacies. I mean, I have lived about 40 years. And so under this approach, I could expect that my future longevity would be somewhere between one more year, or 39-times-40 years, which is a very large number that I'm not going to live to. I mean, we know that there are definite upper limits on the human lifespan.

So this is one of the big criticisms that he gets, is that he treats this idea sometimes as entirely universal. And he gives over the course of years from ‘89 forward a number of presentations of this, and gets a lot of press. There's even a book that's published that features this and these “doomsday arguments,” as they're called, as one of the prominent examples. And he gives predictions for everything: plays, the duration of journals, the duration, obviously, of the human species. That's in fact, one of his big foci ,if you like. And, so, in fact, he uses that as advocacy for space travel, for saying that, in effect, we could anticipate that we are likely to be in a catastrophic scenario before long. That space travel is maybe one of the ways to avoid it.

He sometimes says, you only do this approach, basically, when you're ignorant. And so, when you get into the details of the argument, it's often based on, and some of the debate over it is over the application of the “principle of indifference”: if you know nothing, you can treat basically any time as equally likely.

But a curious thing is, he's not the only physicist who's making an argument like this. And he's not the only one who's doing it in the context of referring to something Copernican.

In the eighties, Brandon Carter gets connected with a philosopher named John Leslie and they come up with a kind of separate argument that in effect says something like: You want to say that we’re not ordinary, with regard to the entire population of the human species, from the from all the way in the past to all the way in the future, right? Then you should — and this sounds a little bit like delta-T — imagine that you're somewhere in the middle, right? Think about what that means with respect right away to the fact that other science suggests to us, that the population has been exploding. Exponentially.

So what does that mean if you right now are in the middle? If the exponential growth continued… even if the exponential growth didn't drop radically, right? Then you'd be somewhere way improbably early. So then what it immediately suggests is that there's going to be some hard drop off. Hence some sort of, from their perspective, universal catastrophe.

So these are all arguments that are based on the idea that we have limited knowledge of the future, that we are assuming our present is some kind of “average” present, and then applying that to this question of the length of the human species. How much time do we have left? What are the kinds of responses to this?

The debates, I'd say, are the two camps are, are these arguments valid or not.

In the early 2000s, Martin Rees refers to it as the “doomsday argument.” And he focuses on Carter. And he makes this kind of point like, “what do we do with these arguments?” They're kind of, they're aprioristic. We can't quite get rid of them and we can't quite not, right?

There are a number of questions here. There's the arguments on their own lights. Is there a way to simply say they're valid or invalid? Do they, in a certain sense, kind provoke our own questioning of our everyday assumptions about certain kinds of scientific language or discourse in the way that you might imagine something like Zeno's paradox has done. Zeno's paradox is for some people dead wrong, resolved, and others not. I'd say for the contemporary moment, people just treat Zeno’s paradox as a little thing that gets resolved by calculus. But you can imagine putting that aside and putting aside those philosophers who might still dispute whether there's any sort of richness here, you could see it as sort of interrogating the sort of limits of our reasoning, right?

So you could say, is that something similar that's taking place with these? Are they really more about questioning “us,” like, how we can go about this? Can one really go so far as to see catastrophe or at the intervals that, for example, something delta-t starts expanding to, is it any way much more than the kind of wisdom that we already have, like, “this too will pass”? Is it saying much more than that?

So where do you sit on this?

I’ll say, I’m very skeptical of the utility of these arguments. I get very confused about some of this. Gott, for example, he applies the argument to so many things. One of them, for example, is Stonehenge. Stonehenge from his perspective is super long-lived. And so by the lights of the delta-t argument, you're going to have a massive integral of time for it to continue existing.

So let’s say that someone had the idea that they wanted to get rid of Stonehenge. Put up the Stonehenge Casino. Put a hotel up. So now the question is, how do you gauge your intentions? Let’s say the company, Stonehenge Casino LLC, like, should it assume it’s likely to fail? Or does it have to say, somehow, we are now in a special position with respect to this, or do we have to do something to accelerate the timeline? It tells me nothing on this, as far as I can tell. Except to ignore it.

And what if I decided that the middle was special, like it was the peak in some way? I could be constructing my forecasts on the basis of whether or not I was likely to be near the start or near the end. And I treated near the start and near the end as not special. I could do that, I could apply the same mathematics and start working it out. What am I gaining from any of this? The metaphysics of it, the philosophical commitments, the kinds of reasoning we’re engaged in, they don’t offer us a good way out.

There are a lot of examples from the Cold War of people going down lines of argument that lead them into wondering, how long will our civilization last? In your book, A Final Story, you talk about these universal histories that scientists construct, starting from the idea of a deep past of the universe and then moving forward into some kind of hypothetical future. Is doomsday always part of that, or is this a more modern concern?

There is no period in which “doomsday” is not part of what we would now call the scientific enterprise. So in the 19th century, a number of different examples come to mind. And they're kind of over the same complex of things, like sometimes like weighing together evolution and energy, and its availability. There are some principled reasons for this, energy and entropy and so on, the laws of thermodynamics. Like Hermann von Helmholtz, he looks at evolution, and says, “we have to realize that just as all species die, our species will die as well.” And he takes as part of the wisdom of science, even if it is kind of a bitter lesson.

And then you have other forms of the catastrophic that seem to hover over the later writings of Charles Darwin, or Francis Galton. That culture itself, by easing the conditions of life, in a certain way spells its own catastrophe. And all of these things are, at least, discursively linked.

I will say, that the main difference that strikes me between these 19th-century catastrophes and the 20th-century ones is perhaps the time scales they have in mind. There's the Helmholtzian “second law of thermodynamics implies that eventually all the energy runs out,” and whatever you believe the time scales are, that's a very long time from us. We’re not going experience that. Whereas the nuclear world seems to be about, what if we reduce that time scale to the an order of potentially decades or even, you know, a few minutes when you actually get into the actual the war of things.

There’s an interesting case of the chemist Harrison Brown who worked on the atomic bomb, and later advocated for a world government as the solution to avoiding nuclear war. And in the 1950s, he published a book, The Challenge of Man's Future, where he's just trying to point out, you have to keep in mind, whatever you're calling civilization, it’s basically householding. You need this much of this kind of heavy metal. You need this much food and water. What do you need to maintain this house? And he's saying, just looking at the statistics, if there isn't more energy around the corner, if there isn't other ways to do this, then there's no way this is going to last.

And he revisits this argument time and time again over the coming decades. And he downplays nuclear destruction — because they survive — and he starts looking at other things like massive distinctions between rich and poor nations and what that means and how that's in a certain sense unsustainable, what that means about dangers for life and what life means and so on. And he extrapolates to, funnily enough, 2020, and he says that if things keep going, we’d get to something like 10 billion people. He says things like, if we’re innovative, there are ways to keep this going. And it’s not a coincidence that he gets linked to people in the next generation who work on things like climate change and so on.

How would you characterize the difference between “doomsday arguments” that scientists have made in the past, versus the ones that are being made more presently?

I feel like one of the big differences which I've been trying to wrestle with between as doomsday arguments in the past and doomsday arguments now, is the rise of statistics. And some of the criticism, some of the fight over the validity of delta-t or other kinds of arguments is: what is a reasonable argument in a statistical frame, and what counts? And this is partly a fight over Bayesianism and Frequentism in another. And can you give even give a Frequentist interpretation of life?

In the 1950s, Wolfgang Pauli co-wrote a book with Carl Jung on synchronicity. And Pauli uses it as an occasion to talk about the play of archetypes, like the kind of image of what counts as, in his context, particular kinds of knowledge. And he focuses on Johannes Kepler, and Kepler’s vision of archetypes, which was explicitly linked to geometry, to the idea that the natural world was given in the language of geometry. And Pauli suggests that the modern archetype is probability, probability in statistics. And he sort of flirts with a vision in the sciences in which the sciences periodize themselves as like, a historical-economic mode of explanation of nature. And built in that is a kind of relativism, a historical relativism. And so what does that mean when we're making massive forecasts into the future, right? Said incorrectly, it becomes a kind of wrong form of hope. Maybe our archetypes and our language are so constraining, that science itself offers ways out that we can't see. From another perspective, it’s sort of the demand for a kind of modesty. Which might take us back to the Copernican principle, which at least might caution us in being overweening with respect to our forecasts.

So just as a final question — if I were pinning you down, just for your view right this moment in time, what would your answer be for the likely lifespan of the human species, or at least the human civilization that we've got right now?

I don't know if one wants to call it optimism, but I tend to side with the idea of the durability of individuals we call humans. When it comes to the question of our modes of living, what I would call for me, from my perspective, “civilization,” even now is threatened to such a degree that I'm not sure that I imagine it extending beyond a few more generations. Like, those things that I would want to call “civilization.”

But we’re already really not uncomfortable living with a lot of death, as long as the death is not quite as proximate as we want it to be. And so we watch the displacement of populations, we watch people being starved, and we watch people being bombed and we treat as though it's not a condition of our civilization. Our vision of current civilization is already consistent with a lot of population death and murder. And that makes me feel like, after a certain number of generations, this will not be the “civilization” that would be recognizable to me. But those future people might call what they have “civilization.” This is where it's hard not to be the historian and have this reflex put forward. But you asked me, right? And then I wind up giving this perspectival answer, which I don't love.

Can I phrase it one more time in terms of weirdly enough, like delta-t or Carter? They constantly look at population dropping and that's all they can say. They can't talk about textured lives. And so then they say by their arguments, that there must be something that we would call “catastrophe.” I actually don't agree with the premises, if I had to be honest with myself. Yet the conclusion, I agree, is a strong possibility —  that there will be something that we would call “catastrophe” even if we judged it by the texture of people’s lives. But perhaps we can imagine something else, like ways in which people choose for themselves somehow, to, for example, to live different or to have different kinds of energy consumption, to have population drops that aren’t just about death and demographic disaster. It would still be as consistent with their predictive models as an idea that tragedy is around the corner.