For most of Earth’s history, extinction arrived slowly—through climate, collision, or catastrophe.

Then one species invented a faster way.

In Episode Eleven, we enter the most dangerous chapter of the human story: the moment when our technologies of imagination gave us the power to end ourselves in a single afternoon. Since 1945, humanity has lived inside a permanent countdown—one that has never reached zero, not because of destiny or wisdom, but because of luck. Repeated, implausible, fragile luck.

This episode traces the hidden history of near-misses that almost ended civilization: nuclear weapons dropped by accident, computers that mistook sunlight for missiles, war games that looked too real, and moments when the survival of eight billion people depended on a single human decision made under unbearable pressure.

We meet the people history almost forgot—the officers, engineers, and commanders who hesitated when machines screamed certainty. Who questioned orders. Who said no when every system said yes.

Not heroes in the traditional sense.

Just humans who paused.

What emerges is a chilling realization:

our survival was never guaranteed. It was negotiated moment by moment, by individuals choosing restraint in systems designed for speed, certainty, and escalation.

The episode ends with an unsettling truth. The danger didn’t pass. The countdown never stopped. It merely kept ticking—quietly, invisibly—into the present.

The question is no longer whether we can destroy ourselves.

It’s whether we can keep surviving our own inventions long enough to outgrow them.