There is a man in a library who has not eaten today.
Not because he forgot. Not because he couldn’t afford to. Because somewhere in his calculation of what a human being deserves, comfort didn’t make the list. He sleeps on a trunk. He gives his salary away. He wears the same clothes until they dissolve back into the world they came from, and when someone gives him a coat he finds someone colder and gives it to them too.
This is not a saint. Saints have already made their peace.
This man is at war.
His name is Nikolai Fedorov, and he has decided, quietly, systematically, without apology, that death is a problem to be solved. Not transcended. Not accepted. Not mourned with flowers and philosophy and the comfortable lies we whisper to each other in hospital waiting rooms and at gravesides and in the three in the morning darkness when the loss gets loud again and we reach for whatever framework makes it bearable.
Solved. Like a mathematical proof. Like an engineering challenge. Like the kind of problem that only stays unsolved because we decided, at some point, that solving it was arrogant. That death deserved our respect.
Fedorov thought that was the most dangerous idea humanity ever had.
The Wound That Became a Philosophy
Nikolai Fedorov was born in 1829, the illegitimate son of Prince Pavel Ivanovich Gagarin and a serf woman whose name history has largely failed to preserve, which is itself a kind of answer to every question Fedorov would spend his life asking.
He was given a surname that was not his father’s name and not his mother’s name but the name of his godfather. A placeholder name. An administrative solution to the problem of his existence. His father looked at him and made a decision that Fedorov would spend the rest of his life refuting: you do not get to be continuous with me. You exist, but you exist as a gap. As an absence.
This is where the philosophy begins. In the specific, personal, visceral experience of being a person whose existence has been declared conditional. Whose continuation has been deemed optional.
You want to understand why a man dedicates his entire life to the proposition that every human being who has ever lived deserves to be brought back, literally, physically, bodily brought back? Start here. Start with a boy who understood from the beginning that existence itself can be revoked. That the people with power decide who gets to be real and who gets to be erased. That civilization is very comfortable with erasure as long as it’s done quietly and given a respectable name.
Fedorov was not comfortable with it.
He became a teacher first, moving through provincial Russian towns for over a decade, teaching history and geography with the intensity of a man who believes the past is not past. Who believes the dead are still present, still owed something, still waiting. Then, in 1874, he became a cataloguer at the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow, one of the great libraries of 19th century Russia.
He would stay for twenty-five years.
And here is where the man and the philosophy become indistinguishable, because a library is already a philosophy. A library is already an argument about what we owe the dead. Every book on every shelf is a person who is gone trying not to be gone. Every page is a hand reaching through the dirt. Every sentence is someone saying: I was here. I thought this. I felt this. Please don’t let me disappear completely.
Fedorov honoured this. He devoted himself to it with the same radical seriousness he devoted to everything. Scholars came from across Russia and he could find anything, knew everything, connected any reader with exactly what they needed. Tolstoy came there. Dostoevsky’s circle came there. Vladimir Solovyov, Russia’s most celebrated philosopher of the period, called Fedorov his teacher and father.
And in the hours between other people’s requests, surrounded by the accumulated last words of everyone who no longer existed anywhere except in the words they left behind, Fedorov developed his argument.
The library is noble. The library is insufficient. The library is, at its core, a monument to our surrender. We preserve the thoughts of the dead because we have accepted that the dead themselves are gone forever. We keep the echo because we have given up on the voice. We frame this as reverence.
Fedorov called it resignation dressed in expensive binding.
The Common Task
Fedorov believed that humanity’s singular moral obligation, the only project worthy of the name civilization, was the literal, physical, scientific resurrection of every human being who has ever lived.
Not every human being alive now. Every human being. Ever.
The peasant who died of plague in 14th century Novgorod. The child who didn’t survive her first winter. The soldier who bled out in a field that is now a parking lot. The slave whose name was never recorded because recording it seemed unnecessary. Every person who ever drew breath and then stopped drawing breath.
All of them. Back. In their bodies. Alive.
This is the Common Task. Not a metaphor for social progress. Not poetic shorthand for human solidarity. A task. Concrete. Assigned. Non-negotiable.
The science was not the hard part, for Fedorov. The hard part was the moral architecture. Because Fedorov understood something our current generation of death-defying technologists has largely failed to grasp. You cannot resurrect the dead in a world still organized around competition, accumulation, and the willingness to sacrifice other people for personal advantage. The project is logically incompatible with the civilization we have built.
The Common Task requires that every human being alive redirect their energy, their intelligence, their resources toward a single collective project. Not toward national advantage. Not toward personal wealth. Not toward the fragmented, competitive, zero-sum striving that organizes almost every human institution currently in existence. Toward one thing. Together.
This means the Common Task is not just a scientific program. It is a political revolution. A spiritual transformation. The most demanding collective project ever proposed, because it does not allow for partial participation. You cannot do the Common Task while running an empire. You cannot do the Common Task while fighting a war. You cannot do the Common Task while organizing your civilization around the principle that some people matter more than others, because the entire point is that every person who has ever lived matters equally, unconditionally, without exception.
The man who was told his existence was conditional built a philosophy in which no existence is ever conditional.
As for the science: Fedorov believed that the particles constituting a human body do not disappear at death. They disperse. They become part of the soil, the water, the atmosphere. They move through other organisms and systems but they persist, because matter persists. The atoms that made your great-great-grandmother are still somewhere in the physical universe. Scattered, rearranged, incorporated into other forms, but present. He believed that sufficient scientific and technological development would eventually allow humanity to locate those particles, understand how they were once organized, and reconstruct the body they once constituted.
This sounds, to the contemporary ear, somewhere between visionary and deranged. But sit with it before you dismiss it. The assumption underneath, that matter is conserved, that information about physical organization might in principle be recoverable, that the boundary between dead and alive is a technical problem rather than an ontological one, these are not obviously wrong assumptions. They are, in fact, the assumptions driving significant portions of contemporary physics, information theory, and the longevity research that serious scientists conduct with serious funding at serious institutions right now, in 2024.
Fedorov was working in the 1870s and 1880s. Without a laboratory. Without institutional support. In a library, on his lunch break, having not eaten.
He also understood that Earth would not be sufficient. If you resurrect every human who ever lived, you need somewhere to put them. The planet cannot hold the accumulated dead of all human history alongside the living. This means the Common Task requires the mastery of space. Humanity must become a spacefaring civilization, not for resources or adventure or the romantic notion of destiny among the stars. For housing. For the practical logistical requirement of having somewhere for the returned dead to live.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the man who founded astronautics, who developed the theoretical basis for rocket propulsion, who made space travel mathematically conceivable, was Fedorov’s direct disciple. He sat with Fedorov in Moscow. He absorbed the Common Task. And then he spent his life working out the mathematics of how to leave the planet.
The Soviet space program had cosmism in its bones. The ideology that put Sputnik in orbit and Gagarin in a capsule was not purely materialist communist ambition. It was Fedorovian. The rocket was, in the deepest sense, a resurrection machine. A vehicle for getting to the place where the returned dead would live.
The Theology of the Unbearable
Fedorov was Russian Orthodox. Genuinely, seriously, formed by its liturgy and committed to its central claims. He believed in Christ. He believed in the resurrection.
And that belief, rather than giving him peace with death, made his war with death more total than anything a purely secular philosophy could have generated.
Because if Christ rose from the dead, actually, bodily, physically rose, walked out of the tomb in a body that could be touched and fed and recognized, then resurrection is not a metaphor. It is a demonstration. A proof of concept.
And a proof of concept is not a gift. It is an assignment.
This is the move that makes Fedorov dangerous to every comfortable religious position. He reads the resurrection of Christ and arrives at a conclusion almost no one in the history of Christian thought has been willing to arrive at: resurrection is something humanity is supposed to do. The miracle was not the point. The miracle was the instruction.
Prayer without action is not piety. It is cowardice that has learned to kneel.
Tolstoy was shaken by this and could not accept it. Their relationship is one of the most philosophically charged encounters in 19th century Russian intellectual life, charged precisely because they agreed about almost everything except the thing that mattered most. Both believed in radical moral seriousness. Both believed civilization had made catastrophic compromises with injustice. Both believed serious people must refuse those compromises.
But Tolstoy’s ethics were this-worldly. He wanted land reform, nonviolence, the dismantling of structures that ground ordinary people into poverty. He looked at the Common Task and said: this is a fantasy that distracts from present obligations to people suffering right now, today, in bodies that still have time to be saved.
Fedorov’s response was not gentle. He looked at Tolstoy’s this-worldly ethics and said: you have accepted the terms. You are working within a framework that includes death as a permanent feature, trying to make that framework more comfortable. Every person you save from poverty today will still die. Every injustice you correct will be inherited by people who will also die. You are renovating a building that is structurally condemned and calling it progress.
Tolstoy had no fully satisfying answer.
Neither do I.
The Prophet They Got Half Right
Bryan Johnson is spending millions trying to biologically reverse his age. Peter Thiel funds longevity research. Ray Kurzweil has spent decades preparing for the singularity, the moment when artificial intelligence makes it possible to upload consciousness and achieve digital immortality. The language of Silicon Valley death-defiance is saturated with the assumption that the people doing the defying are the relevant people.
Fedorov would recognize all of them.
Not with approval. With the specific frustration of a man who watches people find the right problem and solve it in entirely the wrong way.
The longevity industry, the transhumanist movement, the Silicon Valley obsession with defeating death, all of it is Fedorovian in its premise and anti-Fedorovian in its execution. They’ve found the right target, but they’ve aimed at entirely the wrong thing.
The Common Task was universal or it was nothing. The resurrection of some people, the wealthy, the technologically connected, the people with access to the right clinics and the right supplements, is not a step toward the Common Task. It is the opposite. It is the recreation, in the domain of mortality, of every hierarchy that has ever organized human suffering. It is the prince acknowledging some of his children and erasing the rest, and calling the acknowledgment progress.
Fedorov would have contempt for private immortality. Not because the goal is wrong. Because the execution is a moral catastrophe. Because he recognized the gesture. He had seen it before. It was the gesture his father made when he looked at a child and decided: you get to continue, and you do not.
But the transhumanists are not wrong that death is a problem. They are not wrong that human technology might eventually be capable of addressing it. They are not wrong that the acceptance of death as inevitable and sacred and beyond human agency is, at least in part, a psychological defense mechanism elevated into philosophy.
They are wrong about the scope. Wrong about the ethics. Wrong about what the project requires of the people doing it.
The Soviet cosmists understood this better. Tsiolkovsky, Bogdanov, Muravyov, Vernadsky, these were people who took the Common Task seriously as a collective project. A universal project. A project demanding the reorganization of an entire civilization rather than the optimization of individual biology.
When Gagarin orbited the Earth in 1961, underneath the official narrative of communist achievement, in the intellectual DNA of the engineers and theorists who made it possible, was Fedorov. Was the librarian who slept on a trunk and believed humanity’s destiny was among the stars not for adventure but for obligation. Not to plant a flag but to build a home for the returned dead.
What You Owe the Dead
Fedorov died on December 28th, 1903.
Pneumonia. A Moscow hospital. He had gone out in the cold without adequate clothing because someone else needed the clothing more. The man who spent his entire life arguing with death lost the argument the way all of us eventually lose the argument. Quietly. In a bed. With unfinished work on the table.
He had published nothing. He owned nothing. He left behind a trunk, some papers, and a philosophy so demanding that over a century later we are still finding new ways to not be ready for it.
Here is the question he leaves you with. Not whether his science is feasible. Whether his moral intuition is correct.
What do you actually owe the dead?
Not rhetorically. Not as the kind of question that dissolves comfortably into gratitude and memory and the occasional visit to a grave. As a moral question with weight and consequence and the capacity to indict you if you answer it honestly. The people who died before you, who suffered before you, who built before you, who loved before you and were erased before you, what is your actual obligation to them? Is memory enough? Is preservation enough? Is the library enough?
Fedorov said no. You may disagree. But disagree seriously. Disagree the way the question deserves, with the full weight of what it is actually asking, not the comfortable diminished version that lets you off the hook before you’ve even felt the hook.
And then sit with this. The thing that has nothing to do with resurrection and everything to do with right now.
Fedorov was illegitimate. Unnamed. Born into a civilization that had a category for his kind of existence and the category was: conditional. He responded by building a philosophy in which no existence is ever conditional. In which the circumstances of your birth or your death or your social position cannot determine whether you deserve to be returned to. Whether you deserve to continue. Whether you matter.
Every person. Ever. Unconditionally.
That is not a scientific proposal. That is a moral position. And it is one you can hold right now, today, without a laboratory or a rocket or a theory of particle reconstruction. You can decide that no existence is conditional. That no erasure is acceptable. That the comfortable agreement to let some people disappear quietly, into poverty, into anonymity, into the categories civilization builds for people it finds inconvenient, is not maturity.
It is collaboration.
The man who slept on a trunk and gave his coat away and died of the cold knew the difference.
He always had.
The question is whether you do.
Much love, David x
