Monument To Yuri Gagarin |
April 12th
2011 was the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight into space, hailed
by the Soviet Union as a triumph for socialist science over capitalism. But the
true story is much stranger.
Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov |
George
Carey's film shows how the Russian space program was kick-started by a mystic
named Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov
who taught that science would make us immortal, and carried forward by a
scientist who believed that we should evolve into super-humans who could leave
our overcrowded planet to colonize the universe.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky |
Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov's ideas are the forerunner of Russian cosmism (which was also influenced by the work of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky) and modern day transhumanist thought.
Stranger
still, Carey shows how those ideas have survived communism and adapted
themselves to the science of the modern world.
Knocking on Heaven's Door: Space Race
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