{"id":121915,"date":"2021-04-25T00:15:58","date_gmt":"2021-04-25T07:15:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/cosmism-russias-religion-for-the-rocket-age"},"modified":"2021-04-25T00:15:58","modified_gmt":"2021-04-25T07:15:58","slug":"cosmism-russias-religion-for-the-rocket-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/cosmism-russias-religion-for-the-rocket-age","title":{"rendered":"Cosmism: Russia\u2019s religion for the rocket age"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/cosmism-russias-religion-for-the-rocket-age.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This brave new world seeks to meld space and cyber-space. For both Immortalists and Transhumanists, the human personality lies in the brain, which can live eternally if \u201cuploaded\u201d onto a computer, a favoured theme of science fiction writers. The company Neuralink aims to provide brain-machine interfaces which merge human consciousness and artificial intelligence \u2013 helping humans \u201cstay relevant\u201d in a world dominated by AI.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>On 28 December 1903, during a particularly harsh Russian winter, a pauper died of pneumonia on a trunk he had rented in a room full of destitute strangers. Nikolai Fyodorov died in obscurity, and he remains almost unknown in the West, yet in life he was celebrated by Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and by a devoted group of disciples \u2013 one of whom is credited with winning the Space Race for the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n<p>Now, just as he prophesied, Fyodorov is living a strange afterlife. He has become an icon for transhumanists worldwide and a spiritual guide for interplanetary exploration.<\/p>\n<p>Fyodorov\u2019s poverty came by religious choice rather than material necessity. He was the illegitimate child of <a href=\"https:\/\/iep.utm.edu\/fedorov\/#H1\">Prince Pavel Gagarin<\/a>, and spent his early childhood on the family\u2019s country estate, until the sudden death of both his father and grandfather, Prince Ivan Gagarin. While Fyodorov\u2019s family had no connection to the first cosmonaut, Anastasia Gacheva of the <a href=\"http:\/\/nffedorov.ru\/wiki\/%D0%97%D0%B0%D0%B3%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B0\">Fyodorov Museum-Library<\/a> in Moscow says there is \u201can important symbolic coincidence \u2013 between the Gagarin who foresaw spaceflight in a philosophical way, and Yuri Gagarin who became the world\u2019s first cosmonaut\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This brave new world seeks to meld space and cyber-space. For both Immortalists and Transhumanists, the human personality lies in the brain, which can live eternally if \u201cuploaded\u201d onto a computer, a favoured theme of science fiction writers. The company Neuralink aims to provide brain-machine interfaces which merge human consciousness and artificial intelligence \u2013 helping [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":417,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,1514,1501],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robotics-ai","category-space-travel","category-transhumanism-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/417"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121915\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}