What will happen when we find out how to not only live forever, but also how to bring the dead back to life? Find out how such scenarios were being dreamt up during the Cosmism movement in the early 20th Century.
I remember my dad making me believe the Russians had turned the moon red. “A blood red commie conspiracy,” he chuckled. This was back in the day, pretty much the last days of the Soviet empire, when, if I think about it, anything seemed possible in a lazy, routine kind of way that characterised much of the second half of the 20th century. There was a blood-moon over Baltimore and he and I were standing outside the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy in John Hopkins University, he was taking a very long time to say goodbye to some of his pals from the physics department and I no longer recall — so much of my memory is out of reach — why he pointed up at the sky and said, “Look Adam, see what the Russians have done to the moon?” It was not like him to invent stories and tell me untruths, especially of a political nature.
Perhaps dad was just preparing me — preparing all of us like he did in so many ways — for how to be discerning and objective in an era of Fake News and rampant conspiracy theory paranoia?
But all that aside, what I’m interested in talking about now is Russian Cosmism, the philosophical and speculative scientific…
