SALVATION IN SPACE
We turn next to another thinker who concluded early on that humanity, in order to preserve itself, would have to venture into outer space. Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829–1903), the illegitimate son of a Russian prince, was an intense but retiring Moscow librarian who was “reputed to have read all the books he catalogued.”45 Unlike all the other figures discussed in this chapter, Fedorov was not widely known during his own lifetime. The posthumous publication of two volumes of his work did not change that situation a great deal, even though the publisher made them available free of charge, in accord with Fedorov’s beliefs about property.46 But the quality of those who admired his work makes up for the lack of quantity: he was known and respected by both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. And Fedorov had one yet more important connection: he assisted, and some think passed his ideas on to, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, among the greatest of the pioneers of space travel.47
In a work composed sometime after a famine in 1891, Fedorov writes that the “learned” have neglected their obligation to the “unlearned” to improve the conditions of their lives, particularly the lives of agricultural workers.48 He is mightily impressed by reports of using explosives to create rain. He regards using the tools of war for peaceful purposes as literally providential, a sign of what God expects of man.49 He is much more skeptical than Reade about the cunning of nature, asserting that it is “extreme childishness” to expect that the “blind force” of nature will produce just good results. It is only when human beings put their will behind their common task—to understand and control that force—that it will be turned to the good by our conscious control.50
Fedorov is well aware that such control as we currently possess is far from guaranteed to be used for the benefit of mankind. What is lacking, he believes, is the necessary sense of human kinship.51 “Unbrotherly relations” make life the “struggle” that has hitherto been definitive of human civilization.52 They also lead to a thoroughgoing misunderstanding of the true meaning of progress. Progress, Fedorov claims, is not to be seen in the superiority of man over beast, the superiority of the present generation over past generations (as Reade would say), or the superiority in this generation of the young over the old.53 Indeed, such a picture of progress has its tragic tone because it is inherently divisive: “Progress makes fathers and ancestors into the accused and the sons and descendants into judges; historians are judges over the deceased, that is, those who have already endured capital punishment (the death penalty), while the sons sit in judgment over those who have not yet died.”54
In contrast, Fedorov—a devout if unconventional adherent of Russian Orthodoxy—writes that we should take our cue from “true religion,” which is “the cult of ancestors, the cult of all the fathers as one father inseparable from the Triune God, yet not merged with him.”55 On this basis Fedorov imagines the single, common task of mankind as a union of sons bent on overcoming the blind forces of nature—not only to defeat hunger, disease, and death for the living, but to achieve the resurrection of all of their fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, etc.56 In a passage that could have been written by a number of today’s transhumanists, he says, “Death has become a general organic evil, a monstrosity, which we no longer notice and no longer regard as an evil and a monstrosity.”57 But we will learn to bring the dead back to life, “substituting resurrection for birth”; we will thereby eliminate the need for sexual reproduction, which is just another example of the blind operation of nature.58 We will solve hunger, too, substituting “creativity for nutrition”: we will not need to eat, but will produce ourselves “out of the very basic elements into which the human body can be decomposed.”59
Even so, Fedorov is not unconcerned about the Malthusian problem of eventual exhaustion of resources here on Earth. He has his own, to us familiar, apocalyptic vision:
The extinction of stars (sudden or slow) is an instructive example, a terrifying warning. The growing exhaustion of the soil, the destruction of forests, distortions of the meteorological process manifested in floods and droughts—all this forebodes ‘famines and plagues’ and prompts us to heed the warning. Apart from a slowly advancing end, we cannot be certain whether a sudden catastrophe may not befall the Earth, this tiny grain of sand in the vastness of the Universe.60
For such reasons resurrection will not suffice; the exploration of outer space is also absolutely necessary to prepare the “future homes of the ancestors.”61 God has arranged that “the Earth itself has become conscious of its fate through man” and this consciousness would be useless were we simply to stand by and observe “the slow destruction of our home and graveyard” at the hands of purposeless nature.62 Rather, “God is the king who does everything for man but also through man” and he intends that humanity not be “idle passengers” but “the crew of its terrestrial craft”63—a remarkable prefiguration of the space-age/environmentalist idea of “Spaceship Earth.”
The reasons for developing space travel transcend the merely practical necessities of overcoming resource exhaustion (“the economic problem posed by Malthus”64) and finding a place for resurrected ancestors. Space travel will also deeply affect our moral nature. Is it more fantastic, Fedorov asks, to believe in the Christian understanding of heaven and the afterlife—“to create a moral society by postulating the existence of other beings in other worlds and envisioning the emigration thither of souls, the existence of which cannot be proven”—or to believe that we might visit other worlds ourselves someday?65 Moreover, to “inhabit all heavenly bodies” would
unite all the worlds of the Universe into an artistic whole, a work of art, the innumerable artists of which, in the image of the Triune Creator, will be the entire human race . . . attaining divine perfection in the cause, the work of restoring the world to the sublime incorruptibility it had before the fall. Then, united, science and art will become ethics and aesthetics; they will become a natural universal technology of their work of art.66
It is through human efforts, then, that a cosmos—an ordered universe—comes to exist, rather than the purposeless chaos, the mere raw materials given us by God, that exists prior to human intervention. We will see a similar point being made many times in the pages that follow.
Both Fedorov and Reade seem to assume that outer space is entirely available for human colonization. In so doing they are taking a position on the question of the existence of life on other worlds, which was in fact already much debated in their day. Developments in astronomy, geology, and biology, in particular the thinking of Darwin, were leading many to consider that there was no reason to expect Earth to be the sole abode of life—and if life could exist elsewhere, so too intelligence may have evolved. We turn to one such thinker next.
EDIFYING ALIENS
French astronomer and spiritualist Nicolas Camille Flammarion (1842–1925) ranks high among the great popularizers of science, particularly astronomy—the Carl Sagan of his time. Owner of a private observatory and author of some seventy books, he was particularly interested in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and was among the first to imagine it in thoroughly alien terms, an idea he presented in both his popular science writing and science fiction. A sense of his contribution can be gauged by the fact that he has craters named for him on both the moon and Mars. Into the 1960s, decades after his death, his name remained on a popular, if by that time much updated, introduction to astronomy. And he garnered all this recognition despite the fact (perhaps in his own time because of the fact?) that