Cosmism
Cosmism proposes that scientific labor belongs to a salvific project: the living owe something to the dead, and space is imagined as the next frontier for humanity’s continued work.
Cosmism is a Russian intellectual movement that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, holding that humanity’s destiny lies in mastering death, resurrecting the dead, and spreading conscious life throughout the universe. Its founding figure, Nikolai Fedorov, taught that the “common task” of humankind is to conquer mortality and, by the labor of science, to raise all who have ever died. Later thinkers, including the rocketry pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, extended the vision into the cosmos, treating space settlement as the natural home of a matured and deathless humanity.
The movement blended Orthodox Christian hope with scientific ambition at a time when the two were usually held apart. For a Mormon transhumanist, cosmism reads as a striking parallel: another tradition that refused to choose between religious promise and technological means, and that took resurrection and cosmic expansion as literal work rather than distant metaphor.
The Common Task and the Redemption of the Dead
Fedorov’s central conviction was that the living owe a debt to the dead, and that redeeming that debt is civilization's raison d'être. He judged it monstrous to accept death as final while directing human ingenuity elsewhere. This resonates with the Restoration’s insistence that “they without us cannot be made perfect” (D&C 128:15) and with temple work performed on behalf of the departed. Both traditions treat the dead as kin awaiting rescue, not as the settled past. Both make resurrection a shared undertaking that binds the generations. Where cosmism named the task, Mormonism supplies a theology in which such a labor participates in the work of God.
Filling the Immensity of Space
In Tsiolkovsky’s orbit, a species that survives death would naturally extend its reach beyond Earth, making space settlement a practical continuation of human flourishing.
Cosmism looked outward as well as backward. Tsiolkovsky imagined humanity leaving the cradle of Earth to fill the heavens, a vision echoed in scripture’s account of “worlds without number” (Moses 1:33) created for the purposes of God. The Restoration envisions exaltation as creative dominion across an expanding cosmos, generations organizing worlds as their inheritance. Cosmism grasped the same horizon from a different starting point, treating the colonization of space as the fitting scope for a species that had conquered death. The two visions converge on a universe meant to be inhabited and cultivated by matured intelligence.
Kinship and Its Cautions
The parallel invites both recognition and discernment. Cosmism at times leaned toward grandiosity and, in some heirs, toward coercive schemes that subordinated the person to the cosmic project. Mormon transhumanism holds the same expansive hope but tethers it to agency, compassion, and consent. The dead are to be redeemed and the cosmos filled by means that honor each person, never by sacrificing the one to the sweep of the whole. Cosmism supplies a bold precedent. Restoration theology supplies the constraint that keeps the boldness humane.