Nikolai Fyodorov 1829 – 1903

Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov was a Russian Orthodox religious philosopher, librarian, and the founder of the movement of thought known as Russian cosmism. He worked for many decades as a quiet and self-effacing librarian at the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow, where he attracted a circle of admirers including Tolstoy, Solovyov, and the young rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. His Philosophy of the Common Task, published posthumously by his disciples, proposed that the common task of humanity is the conquest of death and the eventual scientific resurrection of all ancestors who have ever lived, an idea that shaped much of twentieth-century Russian utopian and space thought.