Nikolai Fedorov and the Climate Crisis

Decades ago I had perhaps my first real brush with transhumanist thought in a rather unlikely place--Nikolai Berdyayev's The Russian Idea. In that study of the Russian philosophical tradition he mentioned a nineteenth century thinker named Nikolai Fedorov who argued for the resurrection of the dead through scientific means as humanity's mission.

Not long after I found my way to more recent work in the field, reading Moravec, Kurzweil, Vinge, and the rest, but it did seem to me that there was something significant in that older line of thought, and investigated it further. Alas, Fedorov is not an easy thinker for one to get to know, especially in English, but scholar George Young did produce notable secondary works about the thinker, and the tradition in which he wrote. And a contact with Young did lead me to a useful translation of some of Fedorov's material, on which I based my own summary of Federov's ideas for the Future Fire publication.

As might be guessed by anyone familiar with all these works, all this was much on my mind when I wrote "Tales From the Singularity," and the novel-length development of that novella, Surviving the Spike, and the associated stories collected in the Paris in the Twenty-First Century anthology. (Those interested in a preview can, of course, check out Tales and Paris at Wattpad, and "Tales" at Inkitt as well, in addition to checking them out at Amazon and other retailers.)

All these years later I still have occasion to think back to Fedorov's arguments when transhuman and posthuman questions come up. Still, what has me turning back to Fedorov now is his call on humanity to move past fossil fuels like coal to renewable energy like solar, and take control of the Earth's climate, a project he recognized as requiring global cooperation. In 2019, with this course looking like our only hope for even the short-term survival of human civilization, it seems that we really should have been paying far more attention to his work--and more broadly, that early and underrated line of transhumanist thought flourishing in Russia long before the term was even coined.

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