The Resurrection of the Dead

The 19th-century Russian thinker Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov proposed a “Common Task” which he held to be the most important project of humanity. Fedorov argued that the greatest alienation was one rarely directly remarked on- that of the living from the dead. To lose someone to death is a profound and permanent wound. We are all crippled, whether or not we realise it, by irrevocable connections to the irrevocably gone.

Others might have used this as a springboard for sad existential reflections on the briefness of life- not Fedorov. Fedorov called for the abolition of death- and not just going forward. He called for the resurrection of everyone who had ever died. I do not know what he was like as a person, but as a thinker, he had the greatest can-do mindset in all history. Apt, for one of history’s first transhumanists.

Although a religious man, Fedorov did not rely upon miraculous means. Rather he called for the discovery, and application, of technological means yet unknown.

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