Courage and Moonshots

On Nikolai Fedorov's impossible dream and the ordinary courage of taking crazy ideas seriously

Behind humanity's greatest scientific achievement lies a philosophical fever dream most people have never heard of. NASA may never have gone to the moon if not for Nikolai Fedorov, a 19th-century Russian librarian who believed that Communism wouldn’t be finished unless we developed technology to resurrect every human who ever lived. I was initially attracted to the audacity of Fedorov’s ideas, but diving deeper into his ideas changed the way I see vision, courage, and what makes someone authentic.

I discovered Cosmism on Twitter when someone tweeted about it. I thought they had misspelled Communism, but this was a guy I’d followed for a while for his sophisticated takes on economics, geopolitics, and tech–so the likelihood of a misspelling was low. So before I scrolled on, I googled “Cosmism,” and subsequently lost my afternoon to the Russian Cosmism Wikipedia page. I ended up buying a book of essays gathered and edited by a Professor at NYU which had work by the Russian Cosmists translated into English and published for the first time in 2018.

Fedorov was an eccentric, almost an ascetic to our modern sensibilities. He was a teacher and philosopher who worked in a library and kept to himself. Through his learning and teaching, he became the father of a philosophy called Cosmism (aka Russian Cosmism or Biocosmism). The radical animating idea behind Cosmism was what Fedorov called the “project of the common task.” I live a pretty even lifestyle but I’ve always been captivated by huge radical ideas–often fittingly called “moonshots”–so when I first heard about it, it had a chokehold on me for months and it was all I could read or think about.

I learned Fedorov was a Communist through and through, even before the revolution. But, importantly, he believed that Communism didn’t go far enough if it only applied to those alive when the Communist project was actualized. This is where his project of the common task comes in. For the absolute equality that Communism promised to be fully realized, he believed it was unjust that generations of people would toil in obscurity and never be able to share in Communism’s utopian result. He insisted that we (the royal we–as in all people alive on Earth when Communism “happened”) needed to resurrect every human who ever lived and also make all humans immortal. Death in any form meant inequality, and inequality is a barrier to true Communism. Anything short of eradicating death would inevitably yield inequalities detrimental to true human prosperity.

In his work in the library, teaching and tinkering on his Cosmist ideas, Fedorov collected other loners and thinkers. Many were as fervent in their belief and as ambitious in their thoughts as Fedorov himself, with Cosmist ideas dominating the art, science, and philosophy of the Communist intelligentsia until Stalin snuffed them out early in his reign. Fedorov’s most notable student was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a schoolteacher and self-taught scientist with a strong background in physics and economics.

Tsiolkovsky took the project of the common task so seriously that he began to ask practical questions like, “what will we do when we accomplish the common task? What other problems will need to be solved when we are all immortal and have resurrected every human who ever lived?” He simply took the idea of the common task at its face value as a given and put one foot in front of the other. He decided that with all those people living forever at the same time, the Earth would run out of resources. The only logical answer? To colonize space.

While other thinkers in the Cosmist movement considered how they might bring everyone back to life, Tsiolkovsky put his physics and math background to work theorizing designs and experiments in rocketry. He hoped to make space colonization a reality. Tsiolkovsky became very good at this, and his work on rocketry would grow to become the backbone of the Soviet space program, which eventually put Sputnik into orbit.

The launch of Sputnik ignited imaginations across the world–not least of which were those in the United States national defense sector. And here, in a slightly hand-wavy fashion, is where we find Fedorov’s relationship to NASA. I couldn’t find anybody on record saying they were specifically influenced by Fedorov, but the Soviets’ success in getting into space would fuel the space race, which would eventually see the Americans land on the Moon. There is a not insignificant direct chain of causality from Neil Armstrong’s first lunar steps back through Sputnik, Tsiolkovksy, and Fedorov.

Before going down this rabbit hole, the boldness of Fedorov’s ideas was what entranced me. The thought of Fedorov scraping a living together in 19th Century Russia as a tutor in a library, having visions as big as resurrecting all of humankind–it was just too much for me to be able to go on grading papers, washing dishes, and clearing my email inbox. It was too grand. I imagined him a spindly man with wild eyes possessed by visions of an immortal proletariat spread across the galaxy. I envied his imagination, his boldness, and his certitude.

People love to talk about the “butterfly effect” where something seemingly inconsequential can have huge, unforeseen impacts elsewhere–so named for the thought experiment of a butterfly flapping its wings and precipitating a tornado later on the other side of the Earth. But I can hardly think of a better analogy than Fedorov: a loner in a pre-industrial library had an idea so crazy that it was the first domino in a chain reaction that would see scientists on the other side of the world put a man on the Moon.

Many of us have been conditioned to approach "crazy ideas" with caution. Think about the last time someone told you, "I have a crazy idea." In movies, this phrase often precedes something genuinely outlandish. But in real life, it's usually a preface to something mildly uncomfortable or a bit socially taboo. The contrast becomes stark when you encounter a truly crazy idea—something big and alien. If you don't immediately dismiss it, you typically react in one of two ways. The first and more common is fear, as if the idea's alien nature threatens your worldview. It may register as disgust or annoyance, but these are just flavors of fear. The second is wonder—a kind of noncommittal inspiration, an implicit recognition of the idea's vast potential. The throughline between these two reactions is your relationship to the unknown.

But as I read on and learned about Fedorov’s students, what inspired me changed. I had a light envy of Fedorov’s certainty, but a deep admiration for Tsiolkovksy’s practicality. Tsiolkovsky may not have achieved his explicit aims of resurrecting humankind, making everyone immortal, and colonizing space, but he revolutionized science as we know it. And if we are ever an interplanetary species, Tsiolkovsky will be in the pantheon of scientists we can attribute some of that to. A lot of people believe crazy things, a lot of people think bold thoughts, and a lot of people work hard. But those three things together, working hard toward a bold, crazy goal, is an affirmation of human life that very few people ever experience.

For most of my life, I have wanted this: bold thinking leading to a crazy idea leading to hard work ultimately leading to big impact. I thought I was lacking crazy ideas. I have always tried to do the sensible next right thing but also always hoped that one day I would come across an idea so outlandish that it would grab me by the shirt and shake me until I grew possessed. I’d be doomed to rave about it forever, roaming the Earth driven to action, wild-eyed with messed up hair, and people would tell stories about me later using words like visage and countenance. But learning about Cosmism and wondering what it meant made me realize I had it all wrong.

I searched for the thread that wove through Fedorov, Tsiolkovsky, the full original story and my obsession with it. I tried to tell friends and family about Cosmism but they looked at me like I was insane. I began to visualize what I didn’t know as a physical barrier to get through. I externalized and conceptualized my ignorance and eventually made peace with it. And then it hit me: the most profound relationship someone can have is not with another person, idea, or institution, but with the unknown itself. Our relationship to the unknown is the fire with which we forge our most valuable human qualities: humility, curiosity, and courage.

Humility is the recognition of the vastness of all the things we do and cannot know. It is not self-flagellation or self-deprecation as some people think, but applied honesty. Humility is the dispassionate measure of the way things are, rather than the judgment of them. Then, curiosity is a playful disposition toward the unknown. To be curious is to decrease your ignorance simply “for the love of the game.” This, in and of itself, is a hopeful, optimistic act, because you are propelling yourself forward into the unknown because of an implicit understanding of some future benefit. Finally, courage is the resolve to proceed in spite of the unknown. It is not the absence of fear but deliberate action in the face of fear. A humble person says, “I know almost nothing,” and a courageous person then says, “and yet, I go on.”

For over thirty years, I was entranced by things like Cosmism because I thought I was lacking for ideas that were big and crazy enough. But in reality, I was lacking each of these things in different measures. As I became aware of this, it started a cascade, and I began to learn how history is littered with visionaries who you discover, when you dig deep enough, were following through on odd hunches and crazy ideas.

Pursuing a crazy idea is one of the key places innovation comes from. Nikola Tesla believed that he spoke to aliens. Physicist Paul Dirac says the Dirac Equation, among his most famous contributions to physics, was revealed to him in a fire. Oppenheimer was obsessed with Eastern religions, famously quoting the Bhagavad Gita after deploying the atomic bomb. Einstein thoroughly studied Helena Blavatsky and theosophy, the esoteric new religious movement she founded. Steve Jobs and John D. Rockefeller would both talk about how they were on a mission from God. German chemist Friedrich Kekulé said the chemical structure of benzene, a compound foundational to organic chemistry, was revealed to him in a dream. What unites these scientists, thinkers, and businesspeople is that they derived purpose, or at least inspiration, from ideas that were incomprehensibly strange yet still shaped what they did with their life.

It can be sexy and cool to be “heterodox” and shout about your big audacious, impossible vision or the future on the street corner, but doing the lame, rote work to build the foundation for your crazy ideas is where real progress comes from. We say Tsiolkovsky invented Soviet Astronautics, but to him, it was just doing math problems, reading books, and running experiments. I first imagined the Cosmists to be revolutionaries who preached at cafes, but it was fascinating in an unpredictable way to discover that the most effective among them were just inspired loners in libraries putting one foot in front of the other.

Most people’s default response to crazy ideas is fear, rather than wonder. We list off all the possible things that could go wrong, rather than all the possible things that could go right. This is what rationalization is–an incremental assessment of what could go wrong. What Tsiolkovsky did was the opposite. It may not seem like wonder, but he looked at the possibility and said, what if we could actually do this? Instead of making a list of what could go wrong, he made a list of ways it could go right and got to work on the practical things that he could do to make that happen. This takes humility and courage.

For most of my life, I imagined two types of people did extraordinary things: people possessed by the zealotry of unshakeable visions, and people who were products of their time or against terrible odds and had no other option. Obviously, this is naive because notably absent are people who act in the face of fear, doubt, or uncertainty. In other words, in my model of how people did amazing things, I did not account for courage, for people moving forward with an alternative vision of how things could be. I only imagined people who had visions they could not get out of their heads or people who had literally no other option. (Realizing this was, frankly, embarrassing.)

What I realized through this journey was that my own thinking had been limited by a kind of intellectual narcissism. I'd written before about finding nihilism silly and distasteful in my review of The Stranger:

"In a strange way, nihilism is not an organic stance born of observation and deduction, but rather a direct response to religion. It's like your friend knows they're not the best-looking person, but they couldn't just be an average-looking person, they have to be profoundly ugly. There is a narcissism that runs through this. Similarly, if life is not derived from the divine mandate of a deity, then obviously it must be completely devoid of meaning. There is a similar narcissism to this."

I now saw I had been guilty of a similar kind of narcissism. The reason none of the big, crazy ideas that had come across my plate over the course of my life had "grabbed" me was because I could always game plan to the end and see that they wouldn't work. But now I was forced to laugh at myself. What if they worked in ways I would never imagine? This opened the door for a sort of hope and playfulness, which made me a lot more curious about big ideas. And over the last year, I've started to take small but concrete steps into an unknown better future - steps I might even call courageous.

This is, of course, not groundbreaking stuff. “Begin with the end in mind,” is step one of any decent self-development goal-setting book for the last few millennia. There is an implicit hope and courage in visualizing a positive outcome. Seeing this in the context of an idea as crazy as Fedorov’s “project of the common task” having spillover effects as big as the first NASA moonwalk broke my brain in the most pleasant way. It has completely redefined the way I relate to the unknown, see myself in the world, and manipulate reality as I move through life.

Before, I used to sit around wanting to accomplish something big and ask, “do I have the vision for this?” and come up with a million reasons why things wouldn’t work. I have recently started instead asking myself, “do I have the courage for this?” But even that is a little too theatrical and misses the point sometimes. After all, Fedorov never resurrected anyone but Cosmonauts and Astronauts still got to space on the back of Tsiolkovsky’s science. The idea is just to get moving.

So if I want to commit to a crazy idea, the best question I’ve found is actually, “if you had the courage to believe something good could happen, what would you do next?” and then just do that, regardless of whether I think I have the courage or not.

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Notes: Huge shout out to all the people who read a draft of this:

Michael Dean

,

Nick Madrid

,

CansaFis Foote

,

Coco Liu

,

Justin Mather

, Matthew Beebe, and of course my wife, who never read it but who I read it aloud to seven or eight times.

Also, here is the book I referenced. I’m still reading it and it’s mostly very good: Russian Cosmism edited by Boris Groys. And here is my contentious review of Albert Camus’ The Stranger which I referenced above:

Confronting the Void | Review of The Stranger by Albert Camus