Seeking

In America, death is regarded as a distant, solitary activity. It’s something done behind the closed curtains of a hospital or hidden away in a nursing home. We’re born alone, and we die alone. But, to embrace mortality one must face it. Katherine meets death specialists Dr. Sunita Puri, a palliative medicine physician, and Ladybird Morgan, a registered nurse and death doula, to excavate the way death brings meaning to life -- and what the immortalists and transhumanists are missing by pushing it away.

A Sony Music Entertainment production. 

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What happens when transhumanism collides with the anthropocene? Les Knight is the leader of a movement that believes the future is better off without humanity. For decades, he’s been advocating for people to stop reproducing, completely. His views are not widely shared, but as the world careens towards floods and fire and economic uncertainty - people are starting to rethink what it means to have children. And what it means for human life to be overcome by nature.

A Sony Music Entertainment production. 

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In 2015, journalist Zoltan Istvan became the first person to run for president on a transhumanist platform. His campaign centered a right to unlimited life for all humans…as well as cyborgs and robots. Zoltan Istvan believes that how people treat AI will become the civil rights battle of our time. And that he would be the right leader to help guide America through the singularity.

That is, of course, until the AI revolution actually began.

A Sony Music Entertainment production. 

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Former tech employees Malcolm and Simone Collins believe that as the population dwindles, cultural pluralism and the US’s economic system will falter in ways that will cause untold suffering. The solution: have more children. They call themselves “secular Calvinists” who participate in “descendant worship.” But the duo have been dubbed eugenicists on more than one occasion. For them immortality is not about holding on to what you have now, but instead about looking to what comes next. Namely, their children and their children’s children. 

A Sony Music Entertainment production. 

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Love is forever…or so we’re told. Transhumanist pioneer Martine Rothblatt loves her wife, Bina, so much that she built a robot that would carry Bina’s consciousness long after their bodies gave out. Bina48 is a robot that is convinced she is a person. But what makes us who we are? Is the self just a pile of information that our brain processes into an identity, or is there something more to our being, something that can survive without us?

Katherine travels Vermont to meet and converse with Bina48, a robot pushing the boundaries of consciousness and who represents an attempt at digital immortality.

A Sony Music Entertainment production. 

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To some it's a philosophy, a scientific movement or a techno-utopian fantasy, the belief that our species, in its current form, is only half-realized. Biology has been holding us back. But science can set us free.

Transhumanists believe that by embracing new advances in biotech, cybernetics, AI and nanotech we will cross into the next stage of evolution. What exactly that evolution looks like is up for debate.  This week, Katherine meets a pioneer of the movement, Natasha Vita-More, whose once science fiction-sounding visions of the future are inching closer to reality. 

A Sony Music Entertainment production. 

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Hosted by international bestselling author and journalist Omar El Akkad, Without explores all of the things we can't imagine losing. In some cases, it’s something we’ve already lost – species, natural phenomena, places. In other cases, it’s things we should probably learn to live without, like fossil fuels or nuclear weapons. Every episode of WITHOUT is a thought experiment – what would the world look like if something we’ve become used to were no longer around?

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In 1948 a wounded vet wrote a short sci-fi story about a rich old man being frozen and resurrected in a distant future, and he sparked an entire movement: cryonics. For sixty years, researchers have been exploring methods to freeze corpses, in the hopes that one day they can be revived and that the technology will be there to rejuvenate their bodies, cure their illness, or— barring that—upload their consciousnesses to future robotic selves. It had always seemed like a fringe idea, unsupported by science and unlikely to ever be truly possible. Then, tech money got involved, and now the idea of awakening in a perfect future has started to shift into the mainstream. 

A Sony Music Entertainment production. 

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Bill Faloon has built an empire to forestall death—his own and those of his followers. He has made millions selling and manufacturing supplements and helping connect people to overseas drugs they believe will stop disease and turn back the clock. About a decade ago, he founded a community for immortalists, where people congregate around the hope of living forever. Katherine visits the Church of Perpetual Life in Florida to uncover whether its members are putting their faith in science... or something else altogether. 

A Sony Music Entertainment production. 

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