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
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.