Closer look at threats to world
Prime’s latest Kiwi documentary series certainly boasts what is an ambitious and frightening premise.
Across three hour-long episodes, Brave New Zealand World (which debuts on the Sky TV-owned free-to-air channel at 8.30pm on Thursday) aims to explore how climate change, nuclear war, pandemic and artificial intelligence could result in the end of human existence.
Through a combination of animation, archival footage, faux future news broadcasts and compelling evidence and testimony from a variety of mostly Aotearoa-based experts, Justin Pemberton (Capital in the 21st Century) and Rachel Currie’s (How Not to Get Cancer) show builds up a thought-provoking and unnerving picture of the biggest threats.
In the opening instalment on the Earth’s biosphere, University of Otago Professor of Public Health and existential risk specialist Nick Wilson details just how close we’ve come to accidental nuclear war around a dozen times, whether via a Norwegian satellite, a flock of geese, or simply the Moon rising over the horizon.
While he worries about what cyber terrorists could do if they gained access to America or Russia’s ‘‘early warning systems’’, UK author Thomas Moynihan reveals how ‘‘the father of the atomic bomb’’ J Robert Oppenheimer wanted to do more research into what any detonation might do to the Earth’s biosphere before conducting tests. ‘‘Fortunately, the atmosphere didn’t ignite, the oceans didn’t boil, but it sparked an era [that we’re still in] in which humanity became a risk to itself,’’ Moynihan says.
That the nuclear threat was reduced from 74,000 weapons in 1986 to today’s around 13,000, is testament to Kiwis like ex-United Nations disarmament adviser Dr Kate Dewes and politicians like former New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange, who were prepared to stand up for their people and the region and force testing in the Pacific to cease. However, Dewes expresses dismay that, for all their efforts, the weapons have not completely disappeared as they had hoped.
Of course, the other perhaps more insidious, but now definitely palpable, human-created crisis facing the biosphere is the changing climate.
Victoria University of Wellington climate scientist Dr Kyle Clem details how the world is locked into a 30cm sea rise by 2050 – even if we stopped using fossil fuels today – and that Melbourne and Sydney are preparing for 50C temperatures by the end of the century.
But Brave New Zealand World also tries to balance that doom and gloom with examples of community action like the UK’s climate assembly and Tā maki Makaurau’s Ranui Earthsong EcoNeighbourhood.
It’s this mix of sobering case studies and statistics and offering up ways of at least potentially mitigating the sometimes terrifying future that lies ahead that make Brave New Zealand World one of the most important local documentary series of recent years.
Brave New Zealand World debuts on Prime at 8.30pm on Thursday.