To learn more about our apocalypse series, click here. To hear part one, click here. And listen to episode 2 below:

Our apocalypse series began one week ago with one grim vision of the future. What if our machines managed to take control of their own code? If they began to self-regulate, even self-replicate? It’s an imaginable scenario — but one that’s still far off in the future.

Watch our guest Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Gene, discuss the genetic theater of the Rio Olympics:

But in the biotech capital of Boston/Cambridge, it has an eerie resonance. Messing with our own code: isn’t that exactly what we human machines are up to—right now, more and more—in labs around this city and around the world?

Thanks to a number of scientific breakthroughs — in particular, the editing technique known as CRISPR/Cas9 — have made possible the manipulation of multiple genetic “sites,” in the service of eliminating genes that harm or hinder — or even to introduce ones that could ameliorate, strengthen, and speed up the species, or parts of it.

The science-minded animators at Kurzgesagt have taken on CRISPR, and why it is being treated as a kind of genetic Holy Grail — or point of no return:

This show is prompted by the incredible pace of progress, and also by some fretting about what the unlocking of the genome might do. We’re inspired to live alongside George Church, the super-confident Harvard scientist behind some of CRISPR’s wildest possibilities. Here’s an incomplete list of the coming attractions from the Church lab.