[HN Gopher] Nikolai Fyodorov wanted to resurrect the dead to liv...
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Nikolai Fyodorov wanted to resurrect the dead to live among the
stars
Author : szkosma
Score : 49 points
Date : 2024-11-02 19:39 UTC (7 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lz.kubicki.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lz.kubicki.org)
| empedocles wrote:
| 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
| durakot wrote:
| 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-
| bodi...)
| _dain_ wrote:
| It's also the background theology of the world of _The Epiphany
| of Gliese 581_ 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._
| thijson wrote:
| 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
| duskwuff wrote:
| 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
| StefanBatory wrote:
| And Jacek Dukaj "Lod" too for Polish fans here!
| lovegrenoble wrote:
| <<< 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
| wsintra2022 wrote:
| MIT press released a book on it a few years back, fascinating
| reading.
| durakot wrote:
| There's also an interesting timeline, even if some of the
| entries are only loosely related to cosmism:
| https://cosmos.art/timeline
| alexeykapustin wrote:
| Nikolai Fyodorov was first Russian Cosmist, and his real last
| name was Gagarin
| api wrote:
| 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.
| c-smile wrote:
| Well we are (humans) are quite lazy (by nature).
|
| The only way for us to move anywhere is to establish set of
| motivations. Utopias (as extreme goals) are such grand scale
| motivations.
|
| Were we, as a society, would be without Russian revolution
| and its attempt to implement extreme utopia of "happiness to
| everybody and free of charge here and now". I suspect that
| modern Europe and US that are social-democratic _now_ (but
| not centuries later) is a result of that idealistic and
| utopian push Russians tried to implement ahead of time.
|
| Humanity needs global goals that will motivate us to move
| further. Global warming fight is OK but not enough I think.
| Something great like "jump to stars now" and is required, no?
| VladimirGolovin wrote:
| Russian here. Speaking of Dugin, I'm not a fan of his ideas
| about archaic way of living, and I don't personally know
| anyone who likes them. I consider him to be a hypocrite who
| talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk - unlike German
| Sterligov, who actually lives in a village without modern
| technology that he founded and built.
|
| However, there's a sad fact about Dugin. He experienced a
| personal tragedy - his adult daughter was murdered, likely
| for political reasons. So, while I'm not a supporter of his
| ideas, I can never judge him for these ideas considering what
| he went through. Maybe advocating for these ideas is his way
| of surviving his tragedy.
| ozornin wrote:
| However, his ideas seem to precede the tragedy
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| Maybe this is my cynicism, but I think the USA is not that
| different from Russia. The few people who have agency are
| just better at psychology. They are great at making the
| masses believe that the utopian ideals handed down from up
| high are their own ideals.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > The Russians are a people of fascinating extremes.
|
| You could say this about most societies. Just pick one of a
| million dimensions that a culture is likely to be an outlier
| in and blamo you got a radical society.
| smogcutter wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| ETH_start wrote:
| What a beautiful soul..
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| 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.
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