Episode 5 – Terraforming the Human: Labor, Identity, and the Body in Ringworld

Larry Niven’s Ringworld is one of science fiction’s grandest spectacles — a megastructure so vast it reshapes our sense of scale. But beneath its glittering surface lies a different kind of engineering: the redesign of humanity itself.

In this episode, Red Horizons dives into Niven’s vision of optimized bodies and sorted identities, where technocracy and eugenics masquerade as progress. We explore how Ringworld’s future imagines labor, gender, race, and disability through the cold lens of “fitness” — and how those same logics echo in our world today, from algorithmic bias to immigration policy.