A New Cosmist Moment

The Cosmists pursued visions of resurrection and immortality but ended up recuperated into Soviet ideology. Modern tech utopians are following in their footsteps.

Last week, yours truly published an article comparing the excitement over recent technological breakthroughs to the early Soviet science craze, especially as it relates to the ideology of Cosmism.

Cosmism describes a collection of ideas first articulated by Nikolai Fyodorov, a Moscow librarian who wrote during the late nineteenth century.

Observing the technological progress of his time, he understood that the natural domain would soon come under the mastery of man—one day, the entire planet could be marshaled to produce energy, and man’s material abilities would become endless. To Fyodorov, once this was achieved, the resurrection of the dead would become both technologically feasible and a moral imperative due to his specific reading of the Bible. To make room for the resurrected generations, space colonization would then become necessary. To quote Fyodorov directly,

[The] conquest of the Path to Space is an absolute imperative, imposed on us as a duty in preparation for the Resurrection. We must take possession of new regions of Space because there is not enough space on Earth to allow the co-existence of all the resurrected generations.

Niche as they may be, Fyodorov’s ideas ended up influencing the work of the rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, whose Cosmism-inflected philosophical writings inspired the architects of the Soviet space program—Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko.

But importantly, these metaphysical worldviews never became integrated into Soviet state ideology. Although the technological innovation of Cosmist-aligned thinkers was useful for Soviet competitiveness and propaganda, Cosmist ideals were quickly neutered and forgotten because there was no political vehicle for their implementation into the state.

The Cosmist experience contains useful lessons for the modern day. For example, in the AI industry many launder transhumanist ideology through ideas like “effective accelerationism.” But established actors in the AI space are already pulling out the ladder beneath them and are willing to enlist the aid of the state to do so. The future of AI and other “transhumanist” technology like genetic modification will fall under the purview of politicians, not scientists and engineers with esoteric ideologies.

Any visionary trying to shape reality has two choices to make if they want to be relevant—either embrace recuperation into the state, or try to build a parallel political vehicle suited to the age they live in. This is the lesson that the communists internalized and the Cosmists did not.

---

Here’s what’s been on the front page lately:

A New Cosmist Moment by Alexander Gelland. The Cosmists pursued visions of resurrection and immortality but ended up recuperated into Soviet ideology. Modern tech utopians are following in their footsteps.

The Only Reason to Explore Space by Marko Jukic. There is only one durable justification for space exploration. If we fail to understand it, our civilization will end on Earth, not among the stars.

Artificial General Intelligence Is Possible and Deadly by Wolf Tivy. Artificial General Intelligence is the central conjecture of the AI field. If it is possible, it will completely disrupt the human condition and probably kill us all.

You Can’t Trust the AI Hype by Ash Milton. Investor hype around AI doesn’t reflect the real impacts of deep learning. That hype rests on a false ideology in which the tech industry is the vanguard of progress.

Walter Kirn on How America Lost the Plot by Matt Ellison. The novelist turns his literary eye to the American story and finds we’re losing our memories under a new imperative to forget.

That’s all for now.