Russian Cosmism

Cosmism was formed as an optimistic vision of the future of mankind in the context of the ideas of its belonging to the intelligent hierarchies of the Universe and its participation in the evolution of the Cosmos. On this long and thorny path, it is assumed that a man will free himself from his biological nature, acquire immortality, absolute knowledge and mega-consciousness.

Cosmism was originated in Russia more than a hundred years ago. That was an esoteric futuristic philosophical concept about post-humanity, technological immortality, resurrection, and cosmic expansion. Early Russian cosmists (N.F. Fiodorov) proposed the idea of decompaction (lightweighting) of the human body, that eventually would not need an atmosphere and would be powered directly by solar energy. They call it “radiant humanity” – a perfect society of highly moral and super-conscious beings merging and colonizing the whole Universe. Modern Cosmism brings to this doctrine an ontological foundation, a scientific structure and a deeper comprehension of possible technology.

At the very beginning of the 20th century, the Russian physicist and philosopher N.A. Umov believed that the entire Universe was “working” on the rare possibility of the appearance of intelligent life on Earth, and that man was responsible for regulating certain evolutionary processes in it. He also wrote about the regulation and management of the blind forces of nature in his “philosophy of the common cause” Η. F. Fedorov: “Nature in us begins not only to be conscious of itself, but also to control itself.” Man, on the other hand, will have to radically change his physical nature (starting with atoms), defeat blind, hostile biological death and then resurrect all his ancestors to create a united front of light, creative power capable of transforming the Cosmos. A.V. also spoke about this. Sukhovo-Kobylin in the article “The Teachings of the World”, where the transformed humanity itself takes on immortal spiritual forms and settles in the entire Cosmos.

Later, the Russian and Soviet scientist and thinker V.I. Vernadsky introduces the concept of the noosphere – the “smart” shell of the Earth, artificially created by human activity on a planetary scale. His ideas received an interesting development in the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin, who in the noosphere will unite all of humanity on its “main axis of evolution”, the essence of which is the formation of a single spirit of the Earth and its subsequent merger with God at the “Omega point”.

The founder of theoretical cosmonautics, philosopher and inventor K.E. Tsiolkovsky believed that a more perfect life exists in more rarefied forms of matter. “Evolution is a forward movement. Humanity as a single object of evolution is also changing, and finally, after billions of years, it turns into a single type of radiant energy. A single idea fills the entire outer space, ”said Tsiolkovsky in his theory of cosmic Er. (retelling by A.L. Chizhevsky). Hundreds of billions of years later, due to the “inclusion of the second law of thermodynamics in the atom” (amazing insight towards the scenario of the great freezing of the Universe), “corpuscular matter will turn into ray matter”, then “after many billions of years, the ray era of space will again turn into corpuscular, but already of a higher level to start all over again. ” The cycles will repeat, and on one of them “a supernova will finally appear, who will be mind as much higher than us as we are higher than a single-celled organism.”

Further, Konstantin Eduardovich argues: “And now, when the mind (or matter) finds out everything, the very existence of individual individuals and the material or corpuscular world he considers unnecessary and will pass into a high-order ray state, which will know everything and desire nothing, that is, that state of consciousness that the mind of man considers the prerogative of the gods. The cosmos will turn into great perfection … passing into a high-level radiant form, humanity becomes immortal in time and infinite in space. ” That is, the world will be repeatedly destroyed, but not to the ground, but to that essence of it, which will retain the experience of previous existences and will be capable of a new birth, self-evolution and the final processing of matter into pure, intelligent energy (read Spirit). Tsiolkovsky laid hundreds of billions of years for this process, which is not so far from the lifetime of our Universe assumed in modern cosmology.

During the twentieth century, Cosmism as a scientific and philosophical direction, in fact, did not develop, probably due to the fact that in its ideas it was significantly ahead of the technological capabilities of mankind of its time. Only in the first quarter of the 21st century did information technologies appear, opening up a real horizon for the implementation of some of the ideas of Russian cosmists, and that is why there is an urgent need for rethinking, clarifying and updating the philosophy of Cosmism itself.