• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

The Secret History of Marxist Alien Hunters

MrRING

Android Futureman
Joined
Aug 7, 2002
Messages
6,053
Probably already somewhere here, so please merge as needed
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/...arxist-alien-hunters?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Space has not always been such an apolitical void. It was the communists, after all, who started the Space Race by launching Sputnik in 1957. The United States reluctantly followed. Even before they took power, Cosmism — the revolutionary belief in space travel — was part of the Bolshevik program. Cosmist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who NASA called a “Father of Rocketry,” believed a socialist humanity ought to free itself of its geocentrist outlook and seek contact with advanced extraterrestrial societies. Carl Sagan, who was at least sympathetic to socialism, and Soviet scientist Iosef Shklovsky made a similar argument in their 1966 book, Intelligent Life in the Universe.

There were also Marxist Ufologists, mainly from the exiled Bolshevik tradition of Leon Trotsky. After Stalin consolidated power, Trotsky was exiled and became a fierce critic of the bureaucracy that swallowed the revolutionary foundations of the Soviet Union and turned the communist Third International into an agent of Soviet foreign policy. Trotsky’s followers declared a Fourth International that continued to push for the communist future envisioned by the early Bolsheviks. The handful of Ufologists among them took Tsiokolvsky’s assessment that “Time must pass until the average level of humankind’s development is sufficient for nonearthly dwellers to visit us” as a messianic prediction. The aliens, like communism, linger in the air, waiting for us to make the world ready for them.
 
There were multiple strands of futurist / utopian / transcendentalist thought in pre-Revolution Russia that contributed to what is sometimes treated as a single unified "cosmism", and I've always had trouble accepting the post hoc claim they represented a single position, theme, or school of thought.

Above and beyond his obvious eminence in the history of rocketry, Tsiolkovsky was also arguably the seminal visionary of space travel (generally) and humanity's collective destiny in moving outward beyond earth's confines. However, Tsiolkovsky was something of an outlier among the diverse thinkers and philosophers considered to be the sources for "cosmism."

As far as I've ever been able to tell the majority of proto-"cosmism" thinkers were addressing grand visions of ongoing human biological / social / spiritual evolution - visions wherein the cosmos was the stage upon which progress was played out rather than an objective in and of itself.

For example ... The single pre-Revolutionary thinker most commonly cited in reference to "cosmism" is Fyodorov (often Anglicized as "Federov"). Fyodorov's focus was on perfecting humanity in preparation for realizing its utopian destiny. Most of his work addresses improving humans and overcoming death. This is why he's often cited as the godfather of transhumanism.

In the wake of the Russian Revolution many of the themes / memes deriving from these earlier thinkers were selectively adopted and retro-fitted with an overlay of Marxist political elements. IMHO these thematic adoptions and / or re-toolings aren't necessarily consistent with each other, aren't clearly consistent with their original authors' visions, and / or aren't easily construed as comprising a single unified outlook or philosophy.

As such, I'm skeptical about strong claims of a coherent lineage for "cosmism" (or any of the affiliated concepts from pre-Revolutionary thinkers) extending from the late 19th century to the present day.
 
Back
Top