Is Immortality a Curse? – Altered Carbon

Is immortality a good thing? Death is the great inevitability of hum an life – we all know, deep down, that one day we will die. And most of us don’t want to die. So, for millennia, human beings have sought methods –religious, occult, and technological – to avoid our inevitable fate. Mostly, people have considered it a good thing: we want to be immortal. Pop culture works like Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon (recently made into a new Netflix series), on the other hand, say “Not so fast! Maybe immortality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be!” And that’s what this episode is about: using Altered Carbon, and the world it presents, to explore the desirability of immortality.