human beings “invent” immortality we press beyond the natural order of things in which we are mere cells in a larger whole, and when we die are dead forever. In similar fashion, with space travel we will also have proven the essentially mundane character of the once-transmundane heavens. Yet Reade’s imaginative assurance about the great things ahead for humanity puts in high relief the ignorance and miseries of humanity today.
These bodies which now we wear belong to the lower animals; our minds have already outgrown them; already we look upon them with contempt. A time will come when Science will transform them by means which we cannot conjecture, and which, even if explained to us, we could not now understand, just as the savage cannot understand electricity, magnetism, steam.41
This is a glorious future, one in which men will be “perfect,” having the power of “what the vulgar worship as a god.”42 But Reade recognizes—more so than did Condorcet—that this vision is not entirely consoling. In a prayer-like passage, he acknowledges that it makes the ills of the present look all the more terrible, and the past a yet darker place:
You blessed ones who shall inherit that future age of which we can only dream; you pure and radiant beings who shall succeed us on the earth; when you turn back your eyes on us poor savages, grubbing in the ground for our daily bread, eating flesh and blood, dwelling in vile bodies which degrade us every day to a level with the beasts, tortured by pains, and by animal propensities, buried in gloomy superstitions, ignorant of Nature which yet holds us in her bonds; when you read of us in books, when you think of what we are, and compare us with yourselves, remember that it is to us you owe the foundation of your happiness and grandeur, to us who now in our libraries and laboratories and star-towers and dissecting-rooms and work-shops are preparing the materials of the human growth. And as for ourselves, if we are sometimes inclined to regret that our lot is cast in these unhappy days, let us remember how much more fortunate we are than those who lived before us a few centuries ago.43
The fact that he calls his book The Martyrdom of Man indicates that Reade is well aware of the tragic side of his progressivism. But “in each generation the human race has been tortured that their children might profit by their woes. Our own prosperity is founded on the agonies of the past. Is it therefore unjust that we also should suffer for the benefit of those who are to come?”44 Until men become immortal, the only satisfaction to be found is in the superiority of the present to the past, and the chance of making one’s own infinitesimal contribution to the future.
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
