The philosophical movement that predicted space travel
By Tim Brinkhof | Published: 2025-09-12 14:41:00 | Source: High Culture – Big Think
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In the 2009 documentary The transcendent manAmerican inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil shares his thoughts on death. Although many philosophers and theologians accept death as an inevitable and defining feature of human existence, Kurzweil refuses to accept this line of thinking. “Death is a great tragedy, a profound loss,” he declares in the film, haunted by the memory of losing his father when he was twenty-two. “I don’t accept that.”
Kurzweil would have found an ally in the little-known 19th-century Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, whose text was published posthumously. Common mission philosophy He made a bold case at the time that death was nothing more than a design flaw—a flaw that advances in science and technology could help correct. Fedorov also believed that this goal of correction—that is, achieving immortality—would unite social groups whose mutual fear of death had historically pitted them against each other.
“Our mission” Fedorov books“It is to transform nature, the blind force of nature, into an instrument of universal revitalization and the union of immortal beings.”
Fedorov’s writings never became mainstream, but they spawned a short-lived visionary philosophical movement known as universalism. This movement materialized during the Industrial Revolution—a period of unprecedented societal change—and generally sought to redefine humanity’s relationship with technology and progress, with the ultimate goal of organizing the forces of nature so that humanity could achieve unity and immortality. The movement offered a more spiritual alternative to both Futurism and Communism.
Although the latter killed off universalism before it had a chance to mature, its principles have taken on new importance in the era of Big Tech. The following interview is with Boris Groys, distinguished professor of Russian and Slavic studies at New York University and editor of the new book Russian cosmismreveals the reason.
In the crematorium
To understand Russian universalism, we must first look at other movements and ideas that arose during the same period. More influential than Fedorov Common mission philosophy Polymath Alexander Chizhevsky’s 1931 article “The Earth in the Bosom of the Sun” interpreted human history as revolving around the sun. Based on the questionable assumption that revolutionary movements require energy, and that energy in its simplest form is derived from solar rays, Chizhevsky listed some historical developments that accompanied astronomical developments. He noted, for example, that progressive governments in the United Kingdom coincided with periods of high solar activity, while conservative governments tended to emerge when solar activity declined due to sunspots.
Chizhevsky’s essay profoundly influenced Russian avant-garde artists such as the painter Kazimir Malevich. Malevich helped stage a futuristic opera called Victory over the Sun, which heralded the eventual extinction of the sun and the world’s descent into chaos. Instead of fearing this disruption, the vanguard welcomed it. “By the beginning of the twentieth century, the embrace of chaos seemed imminent, as no one was expected to believe in the stability of divine or natural order.” Explains in the new book.
The idea of a stable order, whether religious or rational, seems to have lost its ontological guarantee of permanently replacing, rendering obsolete, and ultimately destroying old things, old traditions and familiar ways of life, thus undermining the lingering faith in the “traditional world order.” Technological development, subject to the logic of progress, presented itself as a force of chaos that could not tolerate any stable order. The future became seen as an enemy of the past and the present. It is precisely because of this view that Futurists celebrated the future, because it held the promise that everything that was – and still is – will disappear.
We can find the same sentiment in the writings of the anarcho-futurist poet Alexander Svyatogor, who compared progress to the sudden eruption of a volcano: a violent explosion that destroys everything in its wake while fertilizing the soil to support new life. In his essay “Patriarchy and Anarchic Bio-Universalism,” he rejects Fedorov’s idea that science and technology act as agents of restoration—to restore and preserve what has been lost. He argued instead that future generations “will knead with their hands, like sculptors who knead the clay, the spirit and matter of the world, so as to create an entirely new universe.” More importantly, he also enjoyed the fact that detractors referred to his intellectual group – the “Kreatory” or “Creatorium” – as a “crematorium”.
“They may be right in reaching that conclusion,” he wrote. “In fact, we need to burn a lot, if not all of it.”
Cosmopolitanism from Stalin to Musk
Fedorov and Svyatogor represented two sides of universalism, which Groys wrote had no unified doctrine at all. While the followers of the former viewed technology as “a force that would destroy the ‘old world’ and open the way to build the new world from scratch,” the latter hoped that technology would become a “powerful messianic force” that could transmit knowledge from one generation to another.
Universalists who believed in technology as a messianic force clashed not only with the Svyatogor camp, but also with communists, whose guiding Marxist-Leninist ideology was based on the dismantling of old social orders to create a new world order. Fedorov’s philosophy was particularly at odds with the concept of the “New Soviet Man,” or the campaign waged by the Soviet government to rebuild its citizens physically and mentally and transform them into more obedient and self-sacrificing people. While some universalists embraced communism, they opposed the idea that socialist utopias should be built on the shoulders of generations who would never be able to experience its benefits – a comment that put them at odds with Joseph Stalin and his purges.
Although interest in Russian universalism was quickly extinguished, the movement has gained new life in the 21st century. In fact, it may be more important today than it was in the early twentieth century. Fedorov and Svyatogor’s joint call to colonize outer space to protect humanity from terrestrial disasters, for example, directly parallels Elon Musk’s promise to take humans to Mars.
Thanks to climate change, universalism’s generally ambivalent and hostile attitude toward the natural world should sound familiar, too. “It is fashionable today to love nature, but nature does not love us,” Groys told Big Think. “It is a one-sided love. The central idea of cosmology is that we can only survive under artificial conditions, if we create an artificial world to protect us.”
On the other hand, Fedorov’s writings serve as a reminder that we should not allow scientific or technological progress to come at anyone’s expense, but rather strive to advance the world in its entirety: past, present, and future. “Caring about the past means caring about ourselves, because everything, including ourselves, eventually becomes part of the past,” Groys said.
This article was first published on Big Think in February 2024. It was updated in September 2025.
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