Omega Point

The Omega Point is a spiritual belief and a scientific speculation that everything in the universe is fated to spiral towards a final point of "divine" unification. The term was coined by the French Jesuit Catholic priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). Teilhard argued that the Omega Point resembles the Christian Logos, namely Christ, who draws all things into himself, who in the words of the Nicene Creed, is "God from God," "Light from Light," "True God from true God," and "through him all things were made." In the Book of Revelation, Christ describes himself thrice as "the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end." The idea of the Omega Point is developed in later writings, such as those of John David Garcia (1971), Paolo Soleri (1981), Frank Tipler (1994), and David Deutsch (1997).

Teilhard's Omega Point from The Phenomenon of Man
Teilhard de Chardin describes in his book, The Phenomenon of Man, his conception of evolution and its ultimate fate to which he concludes all of existence will culminate in one supreme divinity of consciousness, The Omega Point. He explains: ""This will be the end and the fulfillment of the spirit of the Earth. The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reach the uttermost limit of its complexity and centrality. The end of the world: the overthrow of equilibrium [the Heat Death], detaching the mind, fulfilled at last, from it material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weigh on God-Omega.""

Teilhard states that evolution does not end with mankind: Earth's biosphere evolved before humans existed. When Homo sapiens inhabited Earth through evolution, a noosphere was created, the cognitive layer of existence. As evolution continues, the noosphere gains coherence. Teilhard refers to this process as "planetization". Eventually the noosphere gains total dominance over the biosphere, it reaches a point of complete independence from tangential energy forming a metaphysical being: the Omega Point.

First Property of the Omega Point

Teilhard's theory says humans will escape the heat death of the universe. Scientifically, this means that intelligence cannot survive. He theorizes that radial energy is non-compliant with entropy, it escapes the collapses of forces at world's end.

Second Property of the Omega Point

The Omega Point does not exist within the timeline of the universe, it occurs at the exact edge of the end of time. From that point, all sequence of existence is sucked into its being.

Third Property of the Omega Point

The Omega Point can be understood as a volume shaped as a cone in which each section taken from the base to its summit decreases until it diminishes into a final point.

Fourth Property of the Omega Point

The volume described in the Third Property must be understood as an entity with finite boundaries. Teilhard writes: ""...what would have become of humanity, if, by some remote chance, it had been free to spread indefinitely on an unlimited surface, that is to say left only to the devices of its internal affinities? Something unimaginable.... Perhaps even nothing at all, when we think of the extreme important of the role played in its development by the forces of compression.""

Tipler
Mathematical physicist Frank Tipler generalizes Teilhard's term Omega Point to describe what he maintains is the ultimate fate of the universe required by the laws of physics: roughly, Tipler argues that quantum mechanics is inconsistent unless the future of every point in spacetime contains an intelligent observer to collapse the wavefunction, and that the only way for this to happen is if the Universe is closed (that is, it will collapse to a single point) and yet contains observers with a "God-like" ability to perform an unbounded series of observations in finite time. However, scientists such as Lawrence Krauss have stated that Tipler's reasoning is erroneous on multiple levels, possibly to the point of being nonsensical pseudoscience. Tipler (1994) has summarized his hypothesis as follows:
 * The universe has finite spatial size and the topology of a three-sphere;
 * There are no event horizons, implying the future c-boundary is a point, called the Omega Point;
 * Sentient life must eventually engulf the entire universe and control it;
 * The amount of information processed between now and the Omega Point is infinite;
 * The amount of information stored in the universe asymptotically goes to infinity as the Omega Point is approached.

Deutsch
In the final chapter of his 1997 book "The Fabric of Reality" physicist David Deutsch considers the Tiplerian Omega Point. Though he criticizes Tipler for making exaggerated physical claims concerning his Omega Point theory, Deutsch stipulates a contracting universe that includes universal quantum computers could prolong the usefulness of the universe given the inevitability of an Omega Point collapse.

Accelerating expansion of the universe
In 1998, a value measured from observations of Type la supernovae seemed to indicate that what was once assumed to be temporary cosmological expansion was actually accelerating. The apparent acceleration has caused many to dismiss Tipler's Omega Point out of hand, since the necessity of a final big crunch singularity is key to the Omega Point's workability. However, Tipler himself believes that the Omega Point is still workable and has explained on multiple occasions why a big crunch/ final singularity is still required under many current universal models.

Technological singularity
The technological singularity is the hypothetical advent of artificial general intelligence theoretically capable of recursive self-improvement, resulting in a runaway effect to an intelligence explosion. Eric Steinhart, a proponent of "Christian transhumanism", argues there is significant overlap of ideas between the secular singularity and Teilhard's religious Omega Point. Steinhart quotes Ray Kurzweil, one of the most prominent singulatarians, who stated that "evolution moves inexorably toward our conception of God, albeit never reaching this ideal." Like Kurzweil, Teilhard predicts a period of rapid technological change that results in a merger of humanity and technology. He believes that this marks the birth of the noosphere and the emergence of the "spirit of the Earth," but the Teilhardian Singularity comes later. Unlike Kurzweil, Teilhard's singularity is marked by the evolution of human intelligence reaching a critical point in which humans ascend from "transhuman" to "posthuman." He identifies this with the Christian parousia.

The Omega Point in pop culture
The Spanish painter Salvador Dali was fascinated by Teilhard de Chardin and the Omega Point theory. His 1959 painting The Ecumenical Council (painting) is said to represent the "interconnectedness" of the Omega Point. Point Omega by Don DeLillo takes its name from the theory and involves a character who is studying Teilhard de Chardin Flannery O'Connor's acclaimed collection of short stories taps the Omega Point theory in its title, "Everything That Rises Must Converge" and science fiction writer Frederik Pohl references Frank Tipler and the Omega Point in his 1998 short story "The Siege of Eternity". Scottish writer/ counterculture figure Grant Morrison has used the Omega Point as a plot line in several of his Justice League of America and Batman stories. Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's The Light of Other Days references Teilhard de Chardin and includes a brief explanation of the Omega Point.