One person who believed our destiny was indeed a collective spiritual awakening, was the French priest and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Exploring the evolutionary trends towards greater complexity, connectivity, and consciousness, he argued that humanity was moving towards an Omega Point—the final end and goal of evolution.
He believed that the universe had been through several major stages of evolution, starting with what he called "cosmogenesis,” the birth of the "cosmosphere"; the Universe. Next was geogenesis, the birth of the Earth (the geosphere). Following that, "biogenesis", the birth of life (the biosphere). With human beings, there came "noogenesis" and the "noosphere", the sphere of thought. He predicted that the final stage, the one that led to the Omega Point, would be "Christogenesis". This would be the birth of Christ consciousness, not in an individual, but in the collective—the spiritual birth of humanity as a whole.
Teilhard de Chardin believed this Omega Point would happen thousands of years in the future. Like many others, he did not take into account the implications of ever-accelerating change. In his later years, he commented on the impact of radio and television in bringing humanity together. Technologies like these, he said, were bringing the Omega Point much closer. Just before he died, the first computers were being developed. Perceiving the potential of this new technology, he predicted that they too would bring the Omega Point even closer. If he had lived to see the emergence of the Internet, he would probably have realized that the Omega Point could come very soon indeed.
