Last week, during a massive military parade in Beijing, a hot microphone caught Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping communing over a subject dear to both their hearts: eternal life. As the two 72-year-olds traipsed up a wide red carpet with their younger acolyte, Kim Jung Un, 41, in tow, Xi was heard through an interpreter saying, “In the past, we used to say that very rarely people lived to 70, but these days at 70 years old you’re still a child.”
The remark appeared to delight Putin, whose smile widened as he began an animated reply. “In a few years, with the development of biotechnology, human organs can be constantly transplanted so that people can live younger and younger, and even become immortal,” he responded, according to a Chinese translator. Xi then predicted: “In this century, humans may live to 150 years old.”
Powerful men pondering immortality is, quite literally, the oldest trope in the book. The epic of Gilgamesh, written somewhere between 2100 and 1200 BCE, chronicles the king of Uruk’s quest to vanquish physical death and live forever. Since then, there’s been no shortage of examples of men going to extreme lengths — from the search for a philosopher’s stone to experiments in testicle transplants and blood transfusions — to cheat death. Medieval romances claimed that Alexander the Great roamed for years through a “land of darkness” in search of a fountain of youth. Several Chinese emperors met their demise after drinking alchemical elixirs of immortality that contained mercury and arsenic. Pope Innocent VIII was rumored to have had three young men essentially slaughtered and drained of their blood so he could ingest it in hopes of outliving a stroke in 1492.
In our modern times, it is not the great courts of Europe or Asia but Silicon Valley that has become ground zero in the quest for eternal life. The transhumanist movement — a philosophical school of thought that believes there will be a technological vector for achieving immortality — has become the gospel of the internet age among the techno-elite. Tech thinkers including Ray Kurzweil, who developed early artificial intelligence models that produced innovations like text-to-speech, embrace transhumanism as an optimistic view of what advances in computing, science and mathematics could do for humanity. Technological progress isn’t something to be feared, he argues, but to be embraced as a mechanism of salvation, even when we may not be able to predict its path.
Transhumanism has taken hold of the imaginations, and wallets, of a coterie of techno-plutocrats, who are investing heavily in a future without the fear of death — particularly their own. Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Bryan Johnson, the venture capitalist who made headlines in 2023 for transfusing his son’s blood in a bid to prolong his youth, have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in longevity startups working on everything from cryobanking one’s corpse to bioprinting organs. In 2024, the global antiaging business was estimated to be worth over $55 billion, according to an industry report.
Transhumanism in its current form — the cold, metallic future where our minds are uploaded to the cloud — may be essentially Californian, with the combination of Hollywood space-age imagination and a technocratic, materialistic idea of progress thrumming through its veins like cryogenic fluid. But its genesis lies half a world away, in the bare room of one 19th-century Russian ascetic, Nikolai Fyodorov (often spelled Fedorov), whom many transhumanists consider their founding saint. His philosophies, including a preoccupation with the physical resurrection and eternal life of every being who ever lived, roiled late 19th-century Russia, and became foundational for scientists and thinkers who would later propel the Soviet Union, and the world, into the space age.
The 1860s were a time of incredible upheaval in the Russian Empire. Tsar Alexander II had liberated the serfs, instituted judicial reform and created a new system of local government. A wave of young middle-class students was preoccupied with the social, political and spiritual future that lay ahead for the country, and voraciously consumed the works of thinkers like Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill and Voltaire while debating the merits of the French Revolution. But no other text held more of a grip on the collective imagination of this new generation than Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel, “What Is To Be Done?” The didactic story cast aside the previous trope of the ruffian Russian protagonist in favor of a “new man.” The novel’s hero, Rakhmetov, is a noble, selfless and upright paragon of a future utopian society, who goes about setting up communes and instigating the revolutionary transformation of the nation. The student generation of nihilists gobbled up this new Cincinnatus, often styling their public personae after Rakhmetov and other characters in the book as they met to discuss how they could take Russia into that utopian future.
In 1864, one of those Russian students, Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson, would meet a real-life Rakhmetov while he was teaching at a village school — a guise for spreading socialist propaganda — in Bogorodsk, a town near Nizhny Novgorod. Even before his arrival, Peterson had heard of another teacher at the school, “a certain Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov, a selfless man who by his life reminded one of Rakhmetov, a man of unusual intelligence and honesty.”
Fyodorov, the illegitimate son of a Prince in one of Russia’s most influential families, had been cast out of his idyllic life on the family estate in southern Russia after his father and grandfather had died, and spent his 20s and 30s moving from town to town teaching in village schools, usually staying no more than a year in any given place. He was a curious figure, who Peterson said “lived as an ascetic; not only did he do without a bed but without even a pillow … he never made any special demands and was always content with what he was given.” Intrigued, and convinced such a man would support his own revolutionary ideas, Peterson sought him out.
But upon meeting Fyodorov, the young teacher received a rude awakening. Fyodorov, who was in his early 40s, listened as Peterson “blurted out” his political ideas and reasons for coming to teach at the village school, before taking him to task on the failings of the French Revolution, as he saw them. Peterson recalled, “I heard from N. F. that the so-called great principles of the great French Revolution — freedom, equality, and brotherhood — are the product of extremely shallow thought, or even of thoughtlessness, since brotherhood cannot result from freedom to fulfill one’s whims or from the envious desire for equality; only brotherhood leads to freedom, for brothers who love one another will not envy one brother who is elevated above others, and will not try to lower him to their own level; and the brother who has raised himself above the others will try to bring all his brothers up to his level.”
Fyodorov then “unfolded an entire world outlook which was perfectly new to me, and which called for the unification of all people in a labor of universal resurrection. I was committed at once and, already, forever.”
Fyodorov, it turned out, was not a socialist revolutionary, or at least not in the traditional sense. He was obsessed not with forming communal utopias for the shivering masses of his day, but with something higher: creating a vast, cosmic kinship where every being who ever lived would be resurrected and live forever, both on Earth and on worlds beyond. His preoccupation was with what he called “the common task” — the putting forth of society’s every effort, in technological, scientific, political and spiritual realms, to secure the immortality and eternal life of mankind, not in a philosophical or metaphorical way, but in a literal, physical sense. It was a mystical, radical idea he had mulled for more than a decade, and with the arrival of Peterson, he had found a disciple to help him propagate it.
“All philosophies, while disagreeing about all else,” Fyodorov wrote, “agree on one thing — they all recognize the reality of death, its inevitability, even when recognizing, as some do, nothing real in the world. The most skeptical systems, doubting even doubt itself, bow down before the fact of the reality of death.” Yet he could not reconcile himself to this notion. He argued that death was a mere condition, not a destiny.
In his book, “The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers,” George Young frames Fyodorov’s Common Task as this: “Man ‘as he ought to be’ is not only himself immortal but engaged in the task of bringing immortality to all others.”
Giving birth to fathers, not children, as mankind resurrected its ancestors would bring a harmonious kinship, a grand patriarchal structure, to the universe. It would take a considerable amount of effort, not just to resurrect the dead and extend the lives of those currently living, but to find means to populate other planets so mankind would not be cheek by jowl with their predecessors in an eternal sardine tin on planet Earth.
Fyodorov’s philosophy was deeply rooted in Orthodox Christianity. He saw the figure of the Trinity — three distinct beings who were one in purpose — as a model for a future where humanity would not be fused into a great mass, but would be engaged in a great collective work. He often ruminated on a passage from the Gospel of St. John, in which Christ tells his disciples, “Truly, truly, I say unto you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father.” Young says that “Fedorov interpreted these words as Christ’s charge to his true followers to match and outdo his own miraculous works … to resurrect not only one Lazarus, but all the dead ancestors.”
Fyodorov anticipated his critics, who would argue that humanity could not possibly innovate its way to immortality. “At the present time everything serves war,” he wrote, “there is not one discovery which the military does not study with the aim of applying it to warfare, not one invention which they do not attempt to turn to military use.” If society could make something as benign as advances in sewing techniques into something for military use, why could it not redirect its every effort into resurrecting the dead and prolonging life for the living?
Young explains that “Fedorov repeatedly emphasizes that technological advance, if pursued independently from advances in morality, the arts, government, and spirituality, and if pursued for its own sake or for purposes other than the resurrection of the ancestors, could end only in disaster.”
“A civilization that exploits, but does not restore, cannot have any other result than the approach of its own end,” was one of Fyodorov’s warnings.
Unlike the techno-libertarian bent of transhumanism coming out of Silicon Valley, which has thus far prioritized the immortality of a few rich elect, Fyodorov was convinced that the whole project wouldn’t work unless everyone — rich and poor, peasant, noble, sinner, saint — came along for the ride. “Not for oneself and not for others, but with everyone and for everyone,” he wrote.
His notion of how to get there is often elided in writings about his work, though it may be one rocket ship Putin can get on board. Fyodorov believed that the only way to achieve his vision was under the rule of a great Russian Orthodox autocrat. “Autocracy is the common task, the objective of which is to serve the life of the whole human race as an expression of maturity; a constitution, however, is the rejection of maturity and the seizing onto and preservation of immaturity, the recognition of amusement and play as the goal of life.”
Fyodorov eventually moved to Moscow, where he took up a post at the Rumyantsev Library (now the Russian State Library), tending to the collection’s books and giving philosophical lectures to a dedicated following who called him the “Socrates of Moscow.” Through Peterson and a few other early disciples, Fyodorov’s ideas found their way into the uppermost circles of Russia’s intellectual elite. In 1876, Peterson sent a manuscript of some of Fyodorov’s ideas to the great novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was awestruck by the arguments it contained. In an 1877 letter to Peterson, he wrote, “Let me tell you that essentially I am in complete agreement with these ideas. I have read them as if they were my own.”
It was, perhaps, a convenient reply, as many of Fyodorov’s ideas are clearly reflected in Dostoyevsky’s seminal work “The Brothers Karamazov.” Young argues that “Fedorov may not have formulated his idea as brilliantly or as dramatically as Dostoevsky did, but the manuscript that Peterson sent was probably behind Ivan’s question ‘Who does not desire the death of his father?’ And Fedorov’s arguments that we are all guilty of patricide probably helped Dostoevsky see that all four brothers, even saintly Alyosha, were to one degree or another responsible for the death of Fedor Karamazov.”
Dostoyevsky wasn’t the only literary great taken with Fyodorov’s ideas. Leo Tolstoy, who was at the time going through a great personal upheaval over the state of his own soul, sought out Fyodorov on several occasions and found his theories intriguing, even if he did not personally subscribe to them. Tolstoy particularly admired Fyodorov’s simple, humble lifestyle. Fydorov slept on a humpback trunk under newspapers, was a vegetarian and gave away all his personal belongings — something Tolstoy aspired to and at times tried to emulate in his own life. The two developed a relationship that was not quite friendly, but had a lasting impact on Tolstoy as he wrestled with great matters of the soul.
Though Fyodorov counted some of the greatest Russian writers among his interlocutors, his own writing was so abstruse and turgid that the manuscript for “The Philosophy of the Common Task” was nigh unreadable. Instead, his ideas percolated through the intelligentsia orally and were passed down to new generations of thinkers who took his theories and ran in different directions with them. They would come to be known as the cosmists.
One of his proteges at the Rumyantsov library, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, took Fyodorov’s notions of populating other planets with our resurrected ancestors to new heights. Over the course of his life, he became obsessed with space travel, sketching out ideas for rocket thrusters and air locks, and his seminal 1903 work, “Space Exploration by Means of Rocket Devices,” pioneered initial astronautical theory and would become an early blueprint for what spaceflight could look like.
The generation that followed Tsiolkovsky took the philosophy of the common task into Russia’s revolutionary age. In 1917, the October Revolution upended the Russian Empire and ushered in the era of communism under the Soviet Union. A group called the Biocosmists wrote a manifesto in 1921 declaring that death was “logically absurd, ethically impermissible and aesthetically ugly,” and putting forward two basic demands: the right to live forever, and the right for unimpeded interplanetary movement. They framed Fyodorov’s arguments in terms of capitalism and social decline: “Death is also responsible for the deepening root of social injustice, monstrous private ownership, and the antagonism between individuals, nationalities, and classes,” they declared. Making earth into its own kind of celestial spaceship and expanding into the universe was one way to solve the questions the communist revolution had yet to remediate.
Much of the cosmic fervor came to a screeching halt with the rise of Josef Stalin, who had many of the Cosmists killed or sent to prison camps. But their ideas persisted, and in the ’60s they became instrumental in the Soviet Union’s success in the space race. Sergei Korolev, who designed the Sputnik 1 satellite and the Vostok 1 spacecraft, which would carry Yuri Gagarin into space, had been deeply influenced by Tsiolkovsky and attributed his lifelong desire to “build rockets and fly in them” to a meeting he had with the thinker in his youth.
Cosmism has persisted, in Russia and in the West, into the 21st century. But after 70 years of Soviet state repression and changing values among intellectual and political elites around the world, much of Fyodorov’s initial Christian orthodoxy has been stripped away. What was initially a salvific task has become one that is largely focused on extending the life and power of a few wealthy individuals. The morality of immortality — once such a central concern of Fyodorov — has become a peripheral question in the voracious quest for innovation. Critics warn that trusting our immortality to a class of capitalist plutocrats risks exploitation: Perhaps we can all live an eternal life of leisure, or perhaps the working man’s life will be extended to labor for the enrichment of the elite indefinitely.
Either way, the quest for technological immortality continues. In the States, Elon Musk, a transhumanism acolyte, is pursuing a terraformed Mars, and dozens of startups are tinkering with ways to preserve and extend life via technological means. Putin has directed millions of dollars of funding toward research conducted by his eldest daughter, Maria Vorontsova, on longevity. There are programs working on bioinks that can 3D-print those organs that Putin is sure can be transplanted over and over again. And in the Siberian tundra, the Institute for Scientific Research in Cosmic Anthropoecology has been conducting experiments on esoteric elements of human consciousness, including telepathic communication with the cosmos.
Despite all the advances, we still die. Perhaps the solution to life’s oldest struggle can be found in the epic of Gilgamesh after all. At the end of the second part of the story, Gilgamesh, who has tirelessly sought the solution to mortality, meets Utnapishtim, the only man to have survived the great flood, who reveals the great secret to the hero. “Life, which you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands.”
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