Omega Point

The Omega Point is a spiritual belief that everything in the universe is fated to spiral towards an Omega Point of divine unification. The term was coined by the French Jesuit 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), and Frank Tipler (1994).

Related concepts
A writer in Wired magazine argues that Teilhard's concept of unity is realized by the World Wide Web. A Newsweek article argues that versions of Teilhard's concept have found a modern resurgence in forms such as the Gaia hypothesis and the technological singularity.

Tipler
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. Tipler's arguments are rejected as pseudoscience by the scientific community. 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.

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.