Erin Brown

Yeah, so it's not even just the quest for immortality in Russia.

In fact, there's a whole movement right now that's called the transhumanism movement, right?

And it's these guys like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Brian Johnson and Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping who are thinking about how to use technological vectors to achieve immortality.

But even though these guys come from lots of different kinds of backgrounds, they actually all have one patron saint.

And it's this guy named Nikolai Fyodorov, who was an ascetic living in Russia in the 1860s.

Hmm.

Now, the 1860s was kind of a wild time in the Russian Empire, right?

This was when the Tsar had just liberated the serfs.

They were instituting local governments.

There was a lot of upheavals around what the future of the Russian Empire would look like.

And...

There were a group of students who were reading a novel that was really interested in the questions of socialism, right?

It's called What Is To Be Done.

And a lot of them were looking for examples of this kind of socialist future.

One of them, a young guy named Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson, actually ran into a real-life example of kind of the perfect man, the new Cincinnatus, when he was out teaching at a country school in Nizhny Novgorod.

It was this guy, Nikolai Fyodorov, who was actually the illegitimate son of a big princely family.

And he'd fallen sort of out of his charmed lifestyle when his father died and he was kicked off his family's estate.

And he had gone from city to city, town to town, teaching in little schools.

And all the while, he had been developing this kind of wild thesis, this wild idea of a future that he called the common task.

And it wasn't about creating utopian communes or socialism in the future.