Even in a future of body-swapping, we still need rubber tubes to breathe underwater.

Netflix’s Altered Carbon is an A+ sci-fi premise in the body of a B+ TV drama, but make no mistake, this is a compliment.

Yes, the performances occasionally feel stilted, the dialogue sometimes drifts into corny; a writing shortcut here or an egregious nude scene there hold it back from the Blade Runner heights it aspires to. But the show builds a fascinating world at such a high level of production, it’s hard to look away. And by setting a pulpy detective story in such a complex future — where identity is fluid and mortality is negotiable — the philosophical questions it raises are so much more mind-bending than the mystery it exposes.

In Carbon‘s vision of the future, each individual’s consciousness is stored in a “stack”, a mini-disc-sized data device embedded at the base of the brain; while bodies are referred to as “sleeves”, mere containers for the individuals who inhabit them. Some characters have inhabited a number of sleeves in their lifetimes. Some use other sleeves temporarily for subterfuge. The richest upper classes have their sleeves cloned and their stacks backed up to the cloud, so they can live for hundreds of years, cycling through body after rejuvenated body, in an uninterrupted aristocracy — with predictably dystopian results.

Throw in a few other weighty ideas like the humanity of AI (consciousnesses who never even get a sleeve), the potential for virtual manipulation (consciousnesses ripped out of their sleeves against their will), or the fragmentation of the individual (copying one consciousness to multiple sleeves) and the implications of this technology alone make the show a worthwhile speculation.

This only scratches the surface, as the show continues to find thought-provoking new implications to explore, amid a murder mystery filled with gun fights, flashbacks, grimy fantasies and brutal violence. It’s existential dilemma wrapped in guilty pleasure, but don’t let appearances fool you.

If you could transplant your consciousness into a new body instead of dying, would you?

Would you want a fresh copy of your own body, in peak condition, at whatever age you prefer? What would you choose?

Or would you experiment with living in totally different bodies? Which ones? Why?

Also dinners. If you can’t agree on where to go to dinner, just quit now.

Whenever there is another news story (like this one) about how we’re inching ever closer to discovering the secret of “defeating death” or “reversing aging”, the easy immediate reaction is “whoa, cool, I can be immortal!”.

Leaving aside the fact that I personally think that sounds terrible (discuss!), the follow-up thoughts are a lot more interesting. Even if people don’t stop dying completely, and just lived much, much longer than they already do, there would be tons of repercussions for society. Economic, environmental, social.

For now let’s focus on one: relationships.

Conventional wisdom says that as life has extended, marriage in particular has been forced to change; that when life expectancy was shorter, it was more attainable to have a healthy relationship for twenty to forty years, but as people live much longer, can any one partnership possibly be expected to sustain itself for sixty, or a hundred?

And if we shift expectations that life will almost certainly extend a hundred years (or two hundred, or more!), it seems likely that our expectations on how any one relationship could last that long will have to shift too.

In a world where people live twice as long, how do the parameters of long-term relationships have to change to accommodate?

Would people still try to partner up and stay together “til death do us part”?

Shift into more open ongoing relationships with multiple partners?

Accept that a series of long-term but non-permanent relationships can be satisfying for all involved?

Or do we just give up marriage all together?