Future technologies, brought to perfection, are indistinguishable from a miracle.
The pace of technological change is accelerating. People of the distant past would struggle to imagine our everyday reality—just as we struggle to believe in the scale of the changes still to come over the next few centuries: for much of what lies ahead, our present-day language does not even have the words.
One of progress's future achievements will be victory over the aging of the human body. But the main theme of this site is far bolder: bringing all departed generations back to life. Skepticism here is understandable, though not so long ago heart transplants and spaceflight were also considered utterly impossible.
What follows is about what the engineering paths to this goal might look like. About the cases in which rebirth would return the person themselves, and the cases in which it would only create their biological copy with the same memories. About how, without upheaval, a single Man-Made Paradise could take in all people without exception, from the most varied and sometimes irreconcilable eras and cultures. And about why that same complex of technologies makes it far easier to build hell than paradise. And finally, about humanity's present-day crisis of purpose and meaning, the collapse of all the great ideologies, and Russian cosmism as a new ontology and a way out of the modern civilizational impasse.
At the foundation of this whole account are the ideas of Russian cosmist thinkers: Fyodorov, Tsiolkovsky, Vernadsky and others.
Two core assertions
The plan for the scientific and technological realization of unlimited longevity for everyone, including those we today call dead, rests on two key assertions.
- The first assertion: someday, hundreds or thousands of years from now, future medical technology will let people not only grow organs outside the body and transplant them, and cure absolutely every disease, but also smoothly adjust the organism's own biological age and appearance to whatever result is desired. The aging of the human body will cease to be inevitable.
- The second assertion: the very notions of “buried” and “finally dead” are not quite the same thing. Such a radical claim naturally calls for a very convincing explanation, which will be given in the chapters ahead. It presupposes a thorough understanding of the differences between terms such as clinical death, biological death, and final informational death. Informational death, to put it very briefly for now, means the loss of the body of data needed to recreate an individual in the flesh—with perfect accuracy, exactly as they were in their last moment of life.
The difficulty here is not so much in understanding (the account itself is simple further on)—what proves hard is to allow that what is described could relate to reality at all. A person from the distant past, given our description, would picture an airplane without much trouble; what would be impossible for them to believe is that such a contraption could fly, and without even flapping its wings.
Philosophical Foundations
The futuristic intentions presented here are based on the works of Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov and his «philosophy of the Common Task». More than a hundred years ago, the founder of Russian cosmism wrote that in the future people of all countries would unite to realise the human ideal embodied in reality. In essence this is comparable to building a conditional Paradise on Earth for all people. A Paradise encompassing mental, physical and social health, or, to put it in more modern terms, Fyodorov wrote about human-centredness and a positive image of the desired future. Not a quotation, but an attempt to briefly convey the meaning of his ideas in modern language. He himself wrote somewhat differently, and for him the human being is not the centre but a participant in carrying out the common design.
Fyodorov's project philosophy (expressed in the language of his time) — included, among other things, the idea that humanity should use science to master all the forces and atoms of nature and, through technological manipulation, return those very atoms to their proper mutual arrangement within now-decayed human bodies, thereby conquering death itself. Today we would say that this is about molecular assembly and nanotechnology.
Fyodorov was widely known in Moscow. His works were read and discussed by the greatest minds of Russia: Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, poet-thinker Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet and others. Relations developed in different ways and were not warm for everyone—with Tolstoy things eventually came to a break.
In his work “The Question of Brotherhood, or Kinship, on the Causes of the Unbrotherly, Unrelated—that is, Unpeaceful—State of the World, and on the Means for Restoring Kinship,” Fyodorov lamented that humanity spends its strength and resources not on victory over death, but on the production of weapons and luxury goods. He argued that these efforts ought to be directed toward a nobler goal, namely humanity's attainment of practical immortality. The moral duty of a future humanity that has mastered the forces of nature, in Fyodorov's view, would then be the work of resurrecting all people who had died before.
The Ethics of Resurrection
One day, the evolution of human ethics will lead us to rethink our relationship with the dead. When that moment comes, the very thought that billions of people have died without fulfilling their hopes will become unbearable, like the cry of a child being beaten by neighbors behind the wall. Of course, for now, while the living are still suffering, only an eccentric would spare a thought for the dead. But the question will inevitably arise once humanity's basic problems have been solved.
We will soon get to the actual engineering approaches to bringing back the dead, but first we should take in the whole meaning-forming puzzle of Russian cosmism from the right distance— the big picture only comes into view from afar.
Russian cosmism contains within it a way out of the modern civilizational impasse. This way out lies in embracing great, long-term goals that give simple and clear answers to the question of "why we need any of this." Russian cosmism — is about those goals beyond the horizon that, by their very existence, are able to correct our course, becoming a guiding star for humanity. It is about goals with meanings that can be grasped and accepted even from the standpoint of an individual's rational self-interest, and that thereby transform their worldview stance and behavior.
The practical goals of this philosophy and its vision of the future.
The Mission of Humanity
It is worth recalling that, according to current astrophysical understanding, after an unimaginably vast number of years the Sun will turn into a red giant, expand, and grow to the size of Earth's orbit, eventually swallowing the planet. Much sooner than that, the oceans will boil away completely, and Earth's atmosphere will be stripped off and carried into space by the solar wind. All life, and everything bound up with human activity on our planet, will disappear—unless we venture out into deep space. So our path leads there in any case, to the stars, and the preservation and multiplication of terrestrial life, its rescue, is itself the mission of humanity.
Humans will have to build what religions described as the "Kingdom of Heaven".
Fyodorov, being a religious man, believed that religion had mistaken a parting prayer for the deed itself (and the deed itself is the resurrection of our ancestors). Christianity, in his view, confined itself to mere temple work, that is, only to a symbolic anticipation of the deed itself. Today, supporters of Russian cosmism may well be atheists, but the philosophy of the "Common Task" itself allows for the possibility of co-working with God, should his plans, unfathomable to us, include the settling of all that created diversity which astronomers observe through the telescope “Hubble”.
This text does not resolve the question of whether God exists, nor does it offer anything in its place. It proceeds from a more modest premise: if religions described the actual state of things, they described it in a language accessible to the people of their time—and in that case what is said in them may prove to be not only a promise but also a task. The reader for whom God exists is not asked here to give up anything of their faith. The reader for whom He does not exist is not asked to believe. The two part ways not over what is to be done, but over whose business it ultimately is—and that is a question this site does not answer.
International cooperation. Peace to the world.
Russia can find in its own intellectual history and offer the world a project with the potential to scale to the entire globe—Fyodorov's very own "Common Task."
To offer, including through BRICS and SCO, a world based on genuine cooperation and mutual assistance of states, rather than on global dishonest competition with bloody tugging of the existing blanket onto oneself.
The true enemies of humanity would be those who incite hatred between people for their own geopolitical or less ambitious interests. Those who deceive, pit people against one another, manipulate, being to some degree beneficiaries of the resulting human suffering, as well as those who help them sow the seeds of hatred across their information fields of lies.
At the foundation of people's interests there is only happiness and a sense of connection with one another.
We must protect our common bright future regardless of our political and religious beliefs.
Immortality, Properly Understood
Immortalism
From the Latin immortalitas —“immortality.” A belief system based on the striving to avoid death or postpone it for as long as possible. The goal of immortalism is to extend human life and ultimately achieve the possibility of unlimited active longevity. By unlimited active longevity here we mean a lifespan of at least several hundred years, and, naturally, in a young and healthy body.
Deathism
A sense of inevitability, grounded in historical experience, that creates psychological mechanisms of reconciliation, emotional defense strategies, rituals, and a collective self-identity rooted in the word “mortals.”
Today, there is no public demand for radical life extension, yet the cosmetics, beauty, and wellness industries generate colossal revenues—a contradiction that any thoughtful reader will notice. The root cause lies in our culture itself, which is literally saturated with the deathist paradigm. From an early age, we are subtly conditioned to believe not only that death is inevitable, but that it is actually good, and that without it things would somehow be even bad. As a result, some people genuinely do not believe that they don't want to die. Many of them sincerely say exactly that: we do want to die, just later. Sometimes they even seem to flaunt this deferred urge to end up in the bioreactor.
Immortophobia
If deathism is an internal acceptance of death, a reconciliation with it, then immortophobia is more of a bashful silencing of interest in positive bodily immortality, attempts to marginalize the topic, a refusal to take it seriously, and other forms of resistance among historians, cultural theorists, philosophers, and artists.
At the same time, integrating death into our worldview must always be accompanied by excluding, from that worldview , the possibility of unlimited longevity, by active objections to it, and by the rejection of positive images of applied immortality. The specific objections to "eternal youth" can be counted on two hands; in this, people are not very original and simply repeat the same arguments.
On the whole, these automatic objections have long been analyzed in detail, and can be considered groundless. But immortophobia itself does not exist at the level of conscious thought; rather, it is embedded in its underlying assumptions — it is a trait of our culture, which is why logic and rational argument alone cannot defeat it.
Universal Rebirth
Engineering Approaches
Resurrection, recreation, revival, returning to life—this is a matter of engineering and reformulating the task.
Today, several different and, of course, quite controversial hypothetical approaches to the task of resurrecting the dead already exist. Other concepts will surely emerge in the future. Everything listed below is an assumption about what the mechanism could be, not an assertion about who will implement it and when. The list does not assign probabilities, does not set timeframes, and does not answer the question of the intention and first cause behind what is happening—it answers only the question of whether this is technically conceivable in principle. This question itself is unusual today, and the text deals precisely with it, rather than substituting answers of a different order.
- Quantum modeling, or reading information from the past about a specific region of spacetime. Creating an exact atomic map of the entire human body for its subsequent recreation.
- Atom-by-atom assembly with perfect precision, based on the last obtained lifetime information about the body's atomic map. This might require reading information from structures in which the entire history of the universe is recorded. Whether such structures exist, storing past states of matter, and whether they are accessible for reading, is unknown today; this is an assumption, not an established fact. Time here is treated as yet another coordinate along which all changes are recorded. It is entirely possible that other carriers exist that we have not yet even guessed at.
- Followed by a perfectly precise physical or digital emulative reconstruction of the individual.
- The use of controlled gravity, making it possible to set up an assembly point in order to draw in the atoms of a deceased individual scattered across the planet. By means of a kind of gravitational magnet, correctly position the atoms relative to one another according to the information matrix obtained of the person's pre-terminal state. The word “gravitational” is used here for its associative closeness, not for its precision: the gravity we know acts on mass and does not distinguish atoms by their origin. What mechanism could assemble atoms by address, we do not know, and it has no name yet. “Magnet” here is a way of describing the principle, not a claim about physics.
The Concept of Substitution
It would seem an obvious fact that people die. Yet it may turn out that this is not a fact at all, but merely an appearance. An illusionist performs the “impossible” not through magic and sorcery, but by manipulating attention: at the very moment of the trick, people's eyes are directed away from where the main event, the substitution, is actually taking place. So too at funerals, perhaps, people are simply looking in the wrong place.
To make this easier to understand, let us examine "substitution" through a practical example. How can a person's life be saved when they face very swift and otherwise unavoidable death?
A simplified two-step algorithm:
- First: instantly remove the person from this time and place, and shelter them in another. The concept of how this is even possible in principle will be described later in the "Physics of Time" section.
- Second: put in the person's place an artificially created body that closely resembles the original externally. The replacement body must be made so precisely that a medical determination of the cause of death could be drawn up in the usual way.
The specific method used to obtain a replacement body-double is not essential: if not this one, then another. Below is one of the possible paths, and if it does not work, that does not affect overall feasibility.
Today's level of biotechnology already allows us to create complex tissue structures and implant them. Reproductive human cloning is legally banned in most countries. Mammalian cloning is well-established and running at scale; it has succeeded with primates too, though with great difficulty. Growing a human body without consciousness is not something we know how to do today—but that looks like a task for the coming decades, not a fundamental barrier. For future generations, growing, 3D-bioprinting, or otherwise creating a complex biological structure in the shape of a human body—an externally quite convincing copy, but without consciousness—looks like it will be a trivial task.
Then, to prevent death in the usual sense of the word, all that would remain is to perform the trick at the right moment—that is, to instantly substitute the real person with a biological copy that looks almost identical to the original.
Theoretically, this would make it possible to physically extract people a split second before their death into some future, where resuscitation, restorative, and other necessary procedures could then be carried out, with a whole arsenal of highly advanced medical and other future technologies on hand.
We are not being asked here and now to believe that this has already been achieved, or will be achieved in exactly this way. This scenario is given as an example of a purely hypothetical possibility—one of the ways in which, in principle, at least in broad outline, a rescue could be arranged. A good deal of space is devoted to it on these pages, but that does not lessen the chances that other variants will work out—perhaps ones no one has even thought up yet.
These days, it is considered far too bold even simply to pose the question in this form: let us think about how resurrection could technically be achieved. In essence, no one has even begun thinking in this direction yet.
Extractions
In 1992, the film "Freejack" came out. A race car driver crashes during a competition, caught on camera, but a split second before the gasoline inferno ignites, the doomed driver is whisked away into the future so his body can be stolen. In that future, a technology supposedly exists for rewriting the brain's neural network from one personality onto another, and healthy bodies were in severe shortage among the rich—so it was precisely they who quietly pilfered bodies from the past for themselves.
The weakness of the plot is that stealing bodies would not be necessary. If we learn to grow a body without higher brain functions, an elderly person's combined brain and spinal cord could be ethically transferred onto it—and their life noticeably extended. Surgery of this caliber is unattainable today: the main obstacle is reconnecting the nerve pathways, and that has not yet been solved. But that is an engineering problem, not a prohibition of nature. Practical time travel to extract people from the past, on the other hand, looks like a far more improbable technological feat, and for it that is exactly where the word "science fiction" is more than fitting today.
The Physics of Time
Could you, without looking anything up, give a complete, exhaustive, written definition of the word "time"? Give it a try.
From the standpoint of physics rather than psychology, time as such does not exist at all —there is only the space-time continuum, an indivisible bond that Albert Einstein formulated in detail quite some time ago.
It is a well-known fact that the faster an object moves, the more slowly its relative time flows, and upon reaching the speed of light, time stops altogether. This does not fit our everyday logic especially well, but from the standpoint of an elementary particle of light—a photon—time does not physically exist. Once a photon is emitted, it may travel for billions of years (our human years), yet for the photon itself, zero time passes between emission and absorption. Time stops completely for a photon because of its speed, and since there is no time for a photon, there is no distance for a photon either. The correct formulation: a photon's proper time equals zero, so the concept of duration is undefined for a photon. This is just one example, understandable to most people, for grasping just how much more complex reality is than it appears to us in everyday life.
Besides speed, being close to objects of great mass, such as black holes, significantly affects the flow of time and can even halt it (from the point of view of an outside observer) as the observed object approaches the event horizon.
Is it possible to build a controllable cross-time teleport using spacetime wormholes, the so-called relic "wormholes," or some other physical principles entirely? Speaking strictly in the language of physics, today, strictly by the book, it is possible to justify theoretical methods of traveling into the past. That, of course, does not yet mean that practical time travel will turn out to be feasible specifically for human beings, but can anyone, in principle, conclusively and precisely dot every i on such a thorny question already today? It is more reasonable to allow for the possibility itself, as an optimistic guess, that such a technology of controlled cross-time transfer will appear—even if only after thousands of years. But if it does appear, it will change everything. The scale of that word “everything” is hard even to grasp right now, yet it could touch everyone, including, quite directly, you personally.
To put it very simply, a real 'time machine' for traveling into the future already exists and works due to the relative difference in the passage of time at different speeds. We cannot yet send a living person a hundred years into the future (cryonics does not count). However, the very principle that makes this practically possible has long been experimentally confirmed, is widely known, and is even accounted for in the operation of your smartphone.
It is important to note that for the technical realization of the idea of resurrection, physically moving an entire body from the past to the future is not the only option. There are fundamentally different approaches to the same task. Perhaps we will be able to mathematically calculate the relative positions of all atoms in a specific region of spacetime, thereby obtaining a snapshot, an exact blueprint of a person's body a moment before what we call death. Then, it might eventually be possible to assemble that exact same person, atom by atom, using nanotechnology or something similar.
Even in the case of a classical funeral, without extraction or substitution, when what occurs is no longer merely biological but, it would seem, already informational death of the person, caused by the decomposition of the body, one cannot assert with one-hundred-percent certainty that consciousness is lost irreversibly and ontologically, with no possibility whatsoever, in principle, of a subsequent perfectly precise re-creation of the individual. Though, of course, it is now generally believed otherwise.
But what is interesting is not merely the engineering possibility of resurrection itself, but the consequences that follow from it — the new reality that this possibility is capable of bringing into being.
Consequences
Even if, at some point in the future, there are no longer any humans left in the familiar sense of the word, and Earth is instead inherited by AI-driven robots, post-humans, transhumans, or some other form of intelligent being, a kind of backup copy of 'classical' humanity will still remain in the past — along with the possibility of bringing it back. Perhaps someone in the future will find this more interesting than recreating the human race anew.
It is enough to pull even a few people out of the past and give them an ocean of time and the sum of technology: sooner or later they will pull someone else out of the past to join them, and after a while, yet another, becoming for the newcomers a kind of guide into the new world — and those newcomers, in turn, will later become guides themselves. The mathematical result is an avalanche, a growing number of 'rescuers', increasing progressively. With an unlimited supply of time in the future, and the universe's other boundless resources — cosmic expansion, nanotechnology, an economy of abundance — we end up with a potential shortage of people who could be pulled out of the past and sheltered from death in the future. After that, perhaps, it will be the turn of pets as well.
The future will be incredible — nothing like what anyone expects today. What is shown in science-fiction films is only a small part, mere puzzle pieces of our shared future to come.
Practical Questions
- Where would we take so many people, and where would we house them — would there be enough space and resources for everyone?
- Will the 'Extracted' be permitted to die, or will death become impossible in the future? How many years will people go on living like this? What should be done if they grow tired of it, or simply bored?
- How much will 'resurrection' cost in rubles, dollars, or bitcoins, and where will that much money come from for everyone? Will there still be a five-day work week there too?
- Is it possible to make everyone happy, and should we even try? Is there any point at all in designing a utopia?
- Will only good people be saved? What does 'good' even mean, and what are its criteria? What is to be done about criminals, suicides, and the mentally ill?
- Will there be laws, governments, police, prisons, and capital punishment?
- Elderly children will be able to meet their own young parents. Will family feelings and bonds survive the encounter?
- What if war, aggression, violence, and the struggle for power are an inseparable part of human nature?
- Paradise, Godmanhood and the Nature of Miracles.
- The problem of the integrity of consciousness and the 'soul.' Is a double, sequential 'resurrection' possible — or a parallel one? And what about more than double?
All these questions relate to the concept of “Hyperworld of the Future”. Some preliminary versions of the answers can be found on a separate page of the site — questions and answers.
Reflecting on this, you're welcome to share your own ideas on these subjects in our Telegram chat .
To Paradise or to Hell — That Is the Question
Resurrection could touch each and every one of us, but in a different, unexpectedly negative way — one that will be impossible to escape.
A technological Hell is far easier to create than a Paradise with all its complex balances and delicate calibrations. The Beautiful Faraway could turn into something else entirely — a place where the living would envy the dead, while no dead remain at all. The negative scenario can be avoided only if we all act together to keep it from ever coming true.
Even without going into the details of this dark engineering, it is simply more comfortable not to know about it. But should it happen, the "ostriches" too will not escape the consequences, and this malicious idea itself cannot be buried in the sand: it will be reinvented again and again, especially in a society poisoned by the venom of hatred, where people crave vengeance on those who wronged them. Whether you like it or not, you now know of the possible consequences, and that means you bear responsibility for them. The best sedative for such cases is, of course, denial.
A man-made Hell is total power — power on a scale never before seen — and it may look highly tempting to the distorted, or, in the terminology of the Strugatsky brothers, the “degenerates”, that is, those who have fallen out of the human race.
Russian cosmism is about more than simply “to be or not to be” — it is about “Paradise or Hell” — which of the two we will actually have to go to. In the second of these scenarios, you would do anything, any number of times, for just one chance, for the hope that you might someday be allowed to die once and for all.
The future is not predetermined; the future is not tradition; the future is however we choose to act from here on. If we go on taking sides instead of uniting, all that will be left is to hope, against all the evidence, that humankind deserves better.
Other notes on important matters
Russia
Russia is an unopened bud, a country shot through again and again, which with every rebirth reveals a new “peculiar character” in the unpredictable anatomy of the newborn. She is a civilization of rupture, of torn traditions, developing by an alternative, leaping path.
In the very depths of her cultural code, there remains to this day the archetype of pre-schism Orthodoxy, which later found expression also in the communities of the Old Believers. It is precisely thanks to this ancient contribution to our cultural matrix that, across that same vast territory, through the crumbling routine of tsarist rule, there once emerged the crimson-blazing contours of the socialist world.
Since the late 1980s, Russia has once again been pregnant — this time with perestroika — and even today she is carrying something new to term.
Russia cannot be grasped with the mind alone, nor measured by any common yardstick…
One can only hope that this country will come to realize the true meaning of its faith and the depth of its notions of justice, and will become their embodiment, offering social trust as a model worth replicating. Perhaps this is precisely its destiny — and after all, who else but us?
This crippled northern flower needs to open like a bud, and through its values it has already managed to put down some of its roots in Soviet science fiction — in the work of Yefremov, the Strugatsky brothers, Kir Bulychev , and other authors.
On "Russianness"
The Beautiful Faraway, in a united human family, a universal planetary brotherhood and sisterhood. One world, one path, and that path leads, in the end, to the stars. The scope of Fyodorov's ideas, his philosophy of the Common Task, opens up vistas through which different peoples, their cultures, and even entire eras can together carry forward this extraordinary, endless symphony — the symphony of life within a community of shared destiny.
On Russian Cosmism
Russian cosmism is a worldview, a project-oriented philosophy aimed at transforming reality. A distinctive point of view on this world, on people, and on the desired future. These and similar definitions are, on the whole, accurate, yet at the same time incomplete — they are not exhaustive. Russian cosmism is an entire continent of ideas about the human being and their place in the Universe. It is a multinational idea. A secular reinterpretation of religious aspirations. A guiding star for the citizens of the cosmos, setting out meaningful benchmarks for development and the means of reaching them — a navigator through thorns to the stars. Russian cosmism is also the faith that people will be able to redirect part of their attention away from the feeding trough of consumption and turn their gaze to the heavens. The hope that we are more than merely domesticated primates. It is a new ontology capable of halting death and global dehumanization. It is about what is to come, about our shared, planet-wide cosmic destiny. A project whose foundation was laid in the works of such representatives of Russian cosmism as Solovyov, Berdyaev, Muravyov, Setnitsky, Florensky, Umov, and Chizhevsky. But this list calls for a caveat, and it is better to make that caveat in full.
The term 'Russian cosmism' only came into use in the nineteen-seventies — later than the death of the last person it brings together. None of them called themselves a cosmist, founded a school, or declared allegiance to a shared movement. It is a construct assembled by researchers after the fact, and its membership varies from author to author. The argument over that membership can still be heard today, within the field itself.
It is important to single out three main lines — three pools of ideas:
— Properly speaking, the 'Fyodorovian tradition'. Brotherhood, a duty to the dead, the cosmos, and technology turned toward the future.
— The Noosphere line — Vernadsky, Le Roy, Teilhard de Chardin. Reason becomes a geological force on a planetary scale. There is no resurrection in this line, nor is immortality a goal within it.
— The line of 'active evolution' — in opposition to the Darwinian one. Darwinian evolution works by a method of blind trial and error, at the cost of the suffering and death of an enormous number of living creatures — and it is offered a replacement: evolution guided by reason. This is specifically about optimizing the very method of evolution itself. The central thesis: evolution on the planet — biological, and not only that — will cease to be blind and cruel, because man is already, right now, its conscious agent. Later, humanity will take the helm of evolution fully into its own hands, in every sense. From this same ideological root, incidentally, transhumanism grows as well.
The Biocosmists are a direct counterexample to the idea of a single trunk. They arrived at the same two goals, immortality and the cosmos, from an entirely different root: anarchism plus the avant-garde. And, having learned of Fyodorov, they publicly distanced themselves from him.
Attempts to subsume all three lines under one shared label or brand don't really hold together. There are intersections, but no consensus. The dominant view inside Russia and the dominant view outside it remain different. A geopolitical toll on the name is levied today outside Russia, and it is levied at first glance — that is, before a single thought has even been read.
Below is a list arranged within three branches: Fyodorov's Common Task, the Noosphere line, and the line of active evolution. It includes both those who are always included in lists of Russian cosmism, and those who usually are not, but who worked, wrote, or spoke meaningfully within that same framework — whatever it happened to be called, and in whatever language it was written. The date given for each is the year of the work, not the year of birth.
Of those already mentioned: Nikolai Umov and Alexander Chizhevsky · 1900s and 1920s. A physicist and a biophysicist, who ended up in the philosophical lineage not by their own choice.
Before the Revolution
Vladimir Odoevsky · 1835. The first fully developed picture of a technological future in Russian prose.
Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin · 1880s. Humanity passes through three stages and in the end spreads out across the Universe.
Alexander Bogdanov · 1908 and 1912. The first to describe a society in which death has been pushed back by science — and the first to write about what that could lead to.
Sergei Bulgakov · 1912. Economy is a form taken by the struggle of life against death.
Porfiry Bakhmetev · 1912. A forerunner of cryonics, half a century ahead of it.
Valery Bryusov · 1914. Death and resurrection are phenomena that science is duty-bound to investigate.
The Twenties and Thirties
Aba and Wolf Gordin, Alexander Svyatogor, Pavel Ivanitsky, Alexander Yaroslavsky · 1921. Biocosmism, and the pan-anarchism it grew out of: immortalism and interplanetarism.
Vladimir Mayakovsky · 1923 and 1928. Asks the future to resurrect him — and shows, in the same breath, how that might end.
Leonid Krasin · 1921 and 1924. Proposed not embalming Lenin but freezing him for a later resurrection.
Valerian Muravyov · 1924. Time is not given to us as a force of nature — it is produced by labor, and so it can be managed.
Sergei Bryukhonenko · 1925. Built an apparatus that sustained life in a head severed from the body.
Alexander Gorsky and Nikolai Setnitsky · 1926. The habit of treating death as a law and a norm is a hidden form of worshipping it.
Andrei Platonov · 1928. The faith in the abolition of death under communism, shown from within and without mockery.
Vladimir Negovsky · 1936 and 1961. Made the boundary of death movable.
The Forties to the Eighties
Nikolai Kholodny · 1940s. Anthropocosmism: man is neither the center of the world nor its guest, but a part of it, obliged to act.
Vasily Kuprevich · 1960s. Death is not a law of nature but an acquisition of evolution — and therefore can be abolished.
Igor Vishev · 1972 and 1974. Introduced the word 'immortology' — the science of immortality.
Svetlana Semyonova and Anastasia Gacheva · 1982. Without them, Fyodorov and Russian cosmism would not be in circulation at all.
The same framework outside Russia. Here the count of dates starts over.
Édouard Le Roy and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin · 1927. The authors of the very word 'noosphere'.
John Desmond Bernal · 1929. The closest Western counterpart to the whole program, all at once.
Julian Huxley · 1957. Man is evolution become conscious of itself.
Robert Ettinger · 1962. Published 'The Prospect of Immortality' at his own expense.
Derek Parfit · 1984. What makes a person of the future me.
Frank Tipler · 1994. The resurrection of everyone who ever lived, derived from cosmology.
Today
Martine Rothblatt and Terasem · 2002 and 2004. Preserve a trace of the dead so that the future can bring them back.
Ray Kurzweil · 2005. Collects his dead father's papers in order to bring him back.
Mormon transhumanists · 2006. A duty to ancestors and a named record of every person who has died, grown up on another continent.
Aubrey de Grey · 2007. Aging is a set of kinds of damage, and each is repaired separately.
Ben Goertzel and Giulio Prisco · 2010. Took the word directly from the Russians and refitted it for the present day.
Alexey Turchin · 2010s. Death is the loss of information; resurrection is the task of recovering it.
Yuval Noah Harari · 2015. The same objection as Bogdanov's, and a hundred years old: suppose it works — then what?
José Cordeiro and David Wood · 2018. Aging must be recognized as a disease, and only then will it start being treated.
Separately
Nikolai and Elena Roerich · 1924. 'Living Ethics'. Often included, but the inclusion is questionable.
Today a single name is needed for all three branches taken together, though it may differ from country to country. In Russia it is, without question, 'Russian cosmism'. Semyonova herself once preferred 'active evolution', but her full formulation of that term could not be openly circulated in the USSR. Fyodorov called part of this the Common Task, and the word 'common' is the crux of it: a task of this scale cannot be solved by any single president of the world, by any one generation, or by any one country. The list above demonstrates exactly that. A resuscitation physician in Moscow. An anarchist poet in Petrograd. A botanist in Minsk. A blind philosopher in Chelyabinsk. An economist in Soviet service in Harbin. A physicist running experiments on bats in Sofia. A crystallographer in Cambridge. A physics teacher in Michigan. A cosmologist in New Orleans. Mormons who carved out space inside a mountain for an archive of everyone on the planet who has died. A physicist at the European Space Agency, writing a manifesto in an internet mailing list. They did not form a school; many had never heard of one another; they wrote in different languages and in different centuries — yet they were advancing the very same vector. What that vector is called matters less: their deeds came before the name, and do not depend on it. What matters more is that all of this become our shared task.
The Hyperworld of the Future
The concept of the 'Hyperworld' is not among the standard, textbook ideas of the Russian cosmists; it can be read as an afterword to them, or simply as a flight of fancy on the logistics of resurrection. And yet corresponding intentions can be found in Fyodorov's own writing: 'the human race, through the regulation of the heavenly worlds, shall itself become the heavenly powers governing the worlds of the Universe.'
The restoration of all the 'deceased' is meant to happen not all at once, but gradually, in stages, as new possibilities appear and as full readiness is reached for the potential problems and risks involved.
In different historical periods, people lived by very different norms of behavior and ideas of morality, which suggests the need to create, for them, the kind of historical reconstructions they are used to, for a period of adaptation to the renewed reality. Those who are restored will need to be given a kind of transitional period and spaces for adaptation. Dropping Vikings, say, straight into a society with modern norms is not the best idea. From the point of view of the revived, everything will unfold closer to what is said in the great books they themselves revere, such as the Bible, and a new heaven and a new earth may, in the process, be observed in the most literal sense possible — that is, on another planet. This is 'the highest idea of existence', as Dostoevsky called it: the idea of immortality, the idea of transforming an imperfect, mortal, suffering existence into the Kingdom of God.
Each revived person will receive a starting reality that comes closest, among those available, to their desires, aspirations, and faith. In addition, they will be able to migrate between these reconstructed worlds under a special protocol that takes into account worldview and cultural constraints — constraints that will gradually transform in everyone living in any of the recreated worlds.
The Hyperworld is a collection of places, planets, and possibly virtual territories — some of them places where even militant individuals will get the chance to act out aggression and the like under regulated conditions. Some of the Scandinavians will be able to do this even after a stay in Valhalla and in the company of the god Odin. All of them, however, will learn, as part of their individual adaptation program, that the world they are in is only one of countless small pieces within a greater whole.
The Hyperworld is the idea of creating historical reconstructions or simulations as a multitude of separate worlds, linked by a shared system of regulation and transit between them. All these worlds, with their scenarios, adaptation programs, and other regulatory mechanisms, people will build themselves; they themselves will agree on the rules within them, design the checks and balances, correct whatever errors are found along the way, and a place there will be offered to every person who has ever lived.
Man-Made Paradise
Faith in the possibility of an earthly Paradise is, above all, faith in people's capacity for positive self-organization. It is the conviction that everyone is born for happiness, that all people are born for happiness, and the pain we feel when that is not so.
The Red Idea — the idea of a Paradise once built — is an ancient dream of humanity, hard-won through generations of suffering. Millions have answered its call across different historical periods and under different circumstances.
Paradise on Earth is a space of possibility, a habitat in which the circumstances created will allow people to express the best of their traits and qualities, rather than the worst. Above all, this Paradise will encompass mental, physical, and social health.
There, the possibilities of biotechnology and cognitive technology will be applied to maintain people's physical and emotional youthfulness — among other things, through optimal hormonal homeostasis and by keeping every other indicator of physical and mental functioning at an ideal level. This will supply vigor, energy, and good spirits — creating conditions in which one would always both want to act and be able to.
A related concept is the economy of abundance, attainable by technological means. It is far easier for people to show their best qualities rather than their worst when the system is not trying to exploit them and wring out of them every last drop of vitality, as so often happens in our present-day reality.
The very assumption that the current state of affairs — which held even more strongly in the past — will remain unchanged forever into the future is itself mistaken, no matter what nanotechnologies, combinations of AI and robotics, new energy sources, or similar advances may be achieved.
All of us, as human beings, are tiny cells within one immense entity, and the great thing that entity is already creating today is bound, in time, to reach the scale of the universe.
At what lesson, at school or in life, were we taught to stop dreaming big? Those who will be born after us need an unclouded horizon, real dreams, real love, real freedom of thought, and the stars as a basic necessity.
Russian cosmism — all paths lead to the best...
