4 ms·

Nikolai Fyodorov wanted to resurrect the dead to live among the stars

62 points by szkosma 2y ago

empedocles 2y ago
Fyodorov's philosophy is a key driver of the plot of the trilogy of novels by Hannu Rajaniemi, starting with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quantum_Thief https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quantum_Thief
- durakot 2y ago
  Interesting. It's also a key (rather dystopian) plot point in Marcel Theroux's Strange Bodies (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17452206-strange-bodies https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17452206-strange-bodi...)
- _dain_ 2y ago
  It's also the background theology of the world of The Epiphany of Gliese 581 https://borretti.me/fiction/eog581 https://borretti.me/fiction/eog581 >And there were those that believed the Common Task was to resurrect the dead in computer simulations, reconstructed from the histories; others who believed spacetime was a crystal in four dimensions and, with the right instruments, the past could be accessed as readily as we look through a telescope; others whose cosmology was an engineered samsara, where, at the end of time, the end becomes the beginning, and the eternal return becomes our farcical resurrection. Others pushed the responsibility for the Common Task onto the gods: in their unknowable lives, they said, the gods were plotting the construction of heaven and the redemption of all men. >He wrote of famines and things that were to her as distant in her past as the Mongol invasions had been to him. >The book opened with the essays of Fedorov, trailed by commentaries written centuries later, called the Letters. In the second part the book moved abruptly, far into the future, to the accounts of the life of Herati of Merv. And by this time two of the promises of Fedorov had been fullfilled: immortality and the settlement of space by the immortals. >The ancients subdued disease and age, they and their children settled the cosmos, they remade their bodies and their souls by hand. But even the gods could not turn back time, or rescue a mind from ashes. And the irreversibility of death was the central anxiety of civilization, and the central sorrow. In Ctesiphon, where quadrillions lived, death was almost unheard of. The surgeons had conquered suicidality. But the numbers of the dead increase only monotonically.
  - Vecr 2y ago
    I'm not sure when this was written, but any new developments in non-equilibrium thermodynamics and/or spacetime theories since then don't change the result. Minds can't be rescued from the past or from "ashes"/decay products.
    - _dain_ 2y ago
      Like I said, it's theology/eschatology, not necessarily the way things really are in that world. I don't want to spoil much further.
- thijson 2y ago
  In this book, old people on earth can volunteer for military service in space. Those that volunteer end up getting their consciousness transferred to a new body, and effectively start a new life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man%27s_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man%27s_War
  - BatFastard 2y ago
    A new life, albeit a very short one. Great book though.
- duskwuff 2y ago
  I'm also reminded of the text on Toynbee tiles [1]: TOYNBEE IDEA IN MOViE `2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toynbee_tiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toynbee_tiles
- StefanBatory 2y ago
  And Jacek Dukaj "Lód" too for Polish fans here!
lovegrenoble 2y ago
<<< Nobody on earth has taken utopia as seriously, on an intellectual, spiritual, and practical level, as the Russians. We have the Brits (by way of Sir Thomas More) to thank for the name and a general distrust of the idea, and America may have been founded on some ostensibly utopian notions, but it's the Russians who ultimately took the idea with the seriousness it merits and followed it to its (tragic, in their case) conclusion.>>> Russian cosmism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism
- wsintra2022 2y ago
  MIT press released a book on it a few years back, fascinating reading.
  - durakot 2y ago
    There's also an interesting timeline, even if some of the entries are only loosely related to cosmism: https://cosmos.art/timeline https://cosmos.art/timeline
- alexeykapustin 2y ago
  Nikolai Fyodorov was first Russian Cosmist, and his real last name was Gagarin
- api 2y ago
  The Russians are a people of fascinating extremes. On one hand, as this explains, they've taken utopian ideas quite seriously and have always been great innovators in the sciences, the arts, and technology. First orbit, first person in space, designed the Tokamak, could easily have been first on the Moon if things had gone a little different, countless great artists and composers, etc. On the other hand there seems to be a side of Russia that's cynical and nihilistic. There's a joke I heard once that goes something like "in America you die for freedom, in France you die for your country, in England you die for the Queen, and in Russia you die." Today you seem to have dominant thinkers in Russia like Aleksandr Dugin who believe only a tiny number of humans are worthy of agency and this is, with a lot of sophistry, romanticized. For a large number of Russians to swallow this implies to me a level of cynicism about the potential of the human condition. Or maybe it's not a contradiction. Maybe the utopianism and innovativeness is a brave stand against the cynicism and totalitarian cults of misery-for-most. The USA of course has its contradictions, like being simultaneously progressive and reactionary. It's a nation built on both slavery and liberation.
smogcutter 2y ago
For those in LA, there’s a related exhibit at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Definitely worth checking out if you haven’t been, the whole collection is a delight.
sherr 2y ago
Has some similarity to Tipler's "omega point" hypothesis iin his 1994 book "The Physics of Immortality" [1]. I read this years ago but have recently bought it again to have another look at. It seems to be a PDF on the Internet Archive as well. It was a very wild idea. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J._Tipler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J._Tipler
- lioeters 2y ago
  I like it. I've read about the original concept by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest. This seems to give it a more sci-fi twist, including simulated universes and bringing back the dead. > According to [Frank Tipler], it is required, for the known laws of physics to be consistent, that intelligent life take over all matter in the universe and eventually force its collapse. > During that collapse, the computational capacity of the universe diverges to infinity, and environments emulated with that computational capacity last for an infinite duration as the universe attains a cosmological singularity. > With computational resources diverging to infinity, Tipler states that a society in the far future would be able to resurrect the dead by emulating alternative universes. > Tipler identifies the Omega Point with God, since, in his view, the Omega Point has all the properties of God claimed by most traditional religions.
ETH_start 2y ago
What a beautiful soul..
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
This seems like a technological reification of christianity. Putting aside the obvious semantic issues of resurrecting dead flesh (which version of the person are you allegedly bringing to life?), if I were resurrected, I would be extremely unhappy.
- Vecr 2y ago
  Opt for cremation then, no one's bringing you back after that. Depending on where you live, brain-only cryonics might be a similar price or cheaper. In case you want to try the other way. In that case you have a somewhat better chance of picking "what version", and they might even take that as your preference for a particular point in time in the case they're using another information recovery process (e.g. some Tipler thing.) Neither option is actually reliable for the direction you want, cheap/"free" cryonics is even sketchier than usual, and someone might be able to pull a version of "you" from your writings and genetics. Probably doesn't count though.

62 points by szkosma 2y ago

Fyodorov's philosophy is a key driver of the plot of the trilogy of novels by Hannu Rajaniemi, starting with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quantum_Thief https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quantum_Thief

durakot 2y ago
Interesting. It's also a key (rather dystopian) plot point in Marcel Theroux's Strange Bodies (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17452206-strange-bodies https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17452206-strange-bodi...)
_dain_ 2y ago
It's also the background theology of the world of The Epiphany of Gliese 581 https://borretti.me/fiction/eog581 https://borretti.me/fiction/eog581 >And there were those that believed the Common Task was to resurrect the dead in computer simulations, reconstructed from the histories; others who believed spacetime was a crystal in four dimensions and, with the right instruments, the past could be accessed as readily as we look through a telescope; others whose cosmology was an engineered samsara, where, at the end of time, the end becomes the beginning, and the eternal return becomes our farcical resurrection. Others pushed the responsibility for the Common Task onto the gods: in their unknowable lives, they said, the gods were plotting the construction of heaven and the redemption of all men. >He wrote of famines and things that were to her as distant in her past as the Mongol invasions had been to him. >The book opened with the essays of Fedorov, trailed by commentaries written centuries later, called the Letters. In the second part the book moved abruptly, far into the future, to the accounts of the life of Herati of Merv. And by this time two of the promises of Fedorov had been fullfilled: immortality and the settlement of space by the immortals. >The ancients subdued disease and age, they and their children settled the cosmos, they remade their bodies and their souls by hand. But even the gods could not turn back time, or rescue a mind from ashes. And the irreversibility of death was the central anxiety of civilization, and the central sorrow. In Ctesiphon, where quadrillions lived, death was almost unheard of. The surgeons had conquered suicidality. But the numbers of the dead increase only monotonically.
- Vecr 2y ago
  I'm not sure when this was written, but any new developments in non-equilibrium thermodynamics and/or spacetime theories since then don't change the result. Minds can't be rescued from the past or from "ashes"/decay products.
  - _dain_ 2y ago
    Like I said, it's theology/eschatology, not necessarily the way things really are in that world. I don't want to spoil much further.
thijson 2y ago
In this book, old people on earth can volunteer for military service in space. Those that volunteer end up getting their consciousness transferred to a new body, and effectively start a new life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man%27s_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man%27s_War
- BatFastard 2y ago
  A new life, albeit a very short one. Great book though.
duskwuff 2y ago
I'm also reminded of the text on Toynbee tiles [1]: TOYNBEE IDEA IN MOViE `2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toynbee_tiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toynbee_tiles
StefanBatory 2y ago
And Jacek Dukaj "Lód" too for Polish fans here!

lovegrenoble 2y ago

<<< Nobody on earth has taken utopia as seriously, on an intellectual, spiritual, and practical level, as the Russians. We have the Brits (by way of Sir Thomas More) to thank for the name and a general distrust of the idea, and America may have been founded on some ostensibly utopian notions, but it's the Russians who ultimately took the idea with the seriousness it merits and followed it to its (tragic, in their case) conclusion.>>> Russian cosmism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism

wsintra2022 2y ago
MIT press released a book on it a few years back, fascinating reading.
- durakot 2y ago
  There's also an interesting timeline, even if some of the entries are only loosely related to cosmism: https://cosmos.art/timeline https://cosmos.art/timeline
alexeykapustin 2y ago
Nikolai Fyodorov was first Russian Cosmist, and his real last name was Gagarin
api 2y ago
The Russians are a people of fascinating extremes. On one hand, as this explains, they've taken utopian ideas quite seriously and have always been great innovators in the sciences, the arts, and technology. First orbit, first person in space, designed the Tokamak, could easily have been first on the Moon if things had gone a little different, countless great artists and composers, etc. On the other hand there seems to be a side of Russia that's cynical and nihilistic. There's a joke I heard once that goes something like "in America you die for freedom, in France you die for your country, in England you die for the Queen, and in Russia you die." Today you seem to have dominant thinkers in Russia like Aleksandr Dugin who believe only a tiny number of humans are worthy of agency and this is, with a lot of sophistry, romanticized. For a large number of Russians to swallow this implies to me a level of cynicism about the potential of the human condition. Or maybe it's not a contradiction. Maybe the utopianism and innovativeness is a brave stand against the cynicism and totalitarian cults of misery-for-most. The USA of course has its contradictions, like being simultaneously progressive and reactionary. It's a nation built on both slavery and liberation.

smogcutter 2y ago

For those in LA, there’s a related exhibit at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Definitely worth checking out if you haven’t been, the whole collection is a delight.

sherr 2y ago

Has some similarity to Tipler's "omega point" hypothesis iin his 1994 book "The Physics of Immortality" [1]. I read this years ago but have recently bought it again to have another look at. It seems to be a PDF on the Internet Archive as well. It was a very wild idea. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J._Tipler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J._Tipler

lioeters 2y ago
I like it. I've read about the original concept by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest. This seems to give it a more sci-fi twist, including simulated universes and bringing back the dead. > According to [Frank Tipler], it is required, for the known laws of physics to be consistent, that intelligent life take over all matter in the universe and eventually force its collapse. > During that collapse, the computational capacity of the universe diverges to infinity, and environments emulated with that computational capacity last for an infinite duration as the universe attains a cosmological singularity. > With computational resources diverging to infinity, Tipler states that a society in the far future would be able to resurrect the dead by emulating alternative universes. > Tipler identifies the Omega Point with God, since, in his view, the Omega Point has all the properties of God claimed by most traditional religions.

ETH_start 2y ago

What a beautiful soul..

PittleyDunkin 2y ago

This seems like a technological reification of christianity. Putting aside the obvious semantic issues of resurrecting dead flesh (which version of the person are you allegedly bringing to life?), if I were resurrected, I would be extremely unhappy.

Vecr 2y ago
Opt for cremation then, no one's bringing you back after that. Depending on where you live, brain-only cryonics might be a similar price or cheaper. In case you want to try the other way. In that case you have a somewhat better chance of picking "what version", and they might even take that as your preference for a particular point in time in the case they're using another information recovery process (e.g. some Tipler thing.) Neither option is actually reliable for the direction you want, cheap/"free" cryonics is even sketchier than usual, and someone might be able to pull a version of "you" from your writings and genetics. Probably doesn't count though.