Russian Cosmism

Russian Cosmism is a current of speculative philosophy that arose in late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Russia, originating with the Orthodox Christian ascetic Nikolai Fedorov (1829 to 1903), which fused Christian mysticism with a program of scientific immortalism: the technological resurrection of every human being who has ever died, the radical extension of human life, the regulation of nature, and the colonization of outer space to house the resurrected. Fedorov's followers and successors, among them the rocketry theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, developed its strands into Soviet astronautics and biospheric science. The movement supplies the "C" in the "TESCREAL" acronym coined by Émile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru to describe the ideological bundle behind Silicon Valley's artificial-intelligence and longevity ambitions.¹²

Nikolai Fedorov and the Common Task

Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov was the illegitimate son of a Russian prince who lived in deliberate poverty, slept on a bare trunk, gave away most of his salary, and refused to be photographed or to own intellectual property. From 1874 he worked for roughly twenty-five years as a librarian at the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow, where he compiled the first systematic catalog of its holdings and held an informal discussion circle after closing time that drew prominent contemporaries. He published nothing in his lifetime; his disciples Vladimir Kozhevnikov and Nikolai Peterson assembled his writings posthumously and printed them in 1906 and 1913 under the title Filosofiya obshchego dela (The Philosophy of the Common Task), distributing the volumes for free in accordance with his opposition to property in books and ideas.¹³

Fedorov held that the supreme moral duty of humanity, the "common task," was to conquer death and to resurrect all of the ancestors who had ever lived, by scientific and technological means rather than by awaiting a supernatural miracle. He argued that the energies humanity spent on war and on sexual reproduction should be redirected toward regulating natural forces, abolishing death, gathering the scattered molecular remains of the dead, and reassembling them into living bodies. Because a resurrected humanity would overflow the Earth, he reasoned that the species would have to master space travel and settle other planets to accommodate the returned generations. Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky read and admired his ideas, with Tolstoy saying he was proud to live in the same era as Fedorov; the Orthodox Church regarded the doctrine as heretical for assigning the work of resurrection to human hands.¹³

Tsiolkovsky, Vernadsky, and the Cosmist Lineage

Fedorov's most consequential disciple was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who as a poor, largely deaf teenager studied at the Rumyantsev library in the early 1870s, where Fedorov directed his reading and, in Tsiolkovsky's own account, "took the place of university professors." Tsiolkovsky went on to derive the rocket equation that governs spaceflight, to theorize liquid-fueled rockets, multistage boosters, airlocks, and pressurized suits, and to write extensively on the cosmic destiny of humanity and the colonization of the solar system; Soviet rocketry, including the work of Sergei Korolev, claimed him as its founding figure. His cosmic philosophy, holding that humanity would spread through space and perfect itself, carried Fedorov's vision into the technical program that produced Sputnik and the Soviet space effort.²⁴

The broader cosmist tendency gathered other major Russian thinkers and scientists into a loosely related tradition. Vladimir Vernadsky developed the concepts of the biosphere and the "noosphere," the sphere of human thought reshaping the planet; Alexander Chizhevsky studied the influence of solar cycles on terrestrial life and history; and the religious philosophers Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Pavel Florensky engaged with Fedorov's themes of bodily resurrection and cosmic transformation. The scholar George M. Young documented the movement in The Russian Cosmists (Oxford University Press, 2012), tracing its esoteric and scientific strands from Fedorov through the Soviet period.²⁵

Influence on Transhumanism and the TESCREAL Bundle

Fedorov's program of scientifically engineered immortality and resurrection is widely identified as a direct nineteenth-century antecedent of transhumanism, which similarly treats aging and death as engineering problems to be solved. A revived, secular "cosmism" appeared in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries among technologists: the artificial-intelligence researcher Ben Goertzel, who popularized the term "artificial general intelligence" and participated in the extropian milieu, published A Cosmist Manifesto in 2010, advancing the merger of humans with machines, mind uploading, and the spread of intelligence through the cosmos.²⁶

Torres and Gebru placed "(modern) Cosmism" as the "C" in TESCREAL, the bundle of Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism that they argued forms a single overlapping ideology of technological salvation prevalent in Silicon Valley, first circulated in 2023 and published as "The TESCREAL Bundle: Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through Artificial General Intelligence" in First Monday in April 2024. The cosmism they target is Goertzel's contemporary version rather than Fedorov's Orthodox original, though the two share the goals of physical immortality and cosmic expansion.⁶⁷