Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

An anthropologist and Jesuit priest of the 20th century. Many of his most important writings were withheld from being published at the request of the church, until after his death. Shortly before he died he spent a few months hanging out occasionally with Jean Houston when she was a young girl. I wonder if he and BuckminsterFuller? ever met?

http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1997/mar/cunning.html

http://www.noogenesis.com/

He coined the terms NooSphere and noogenesis for some of his ideas

From my FavoriteQuotes:

"The human person is the sum total of [a] 15 billion year [chain] of unbroken evolution now thinking about itself"

"We only have to look around us to see how complexity and psychic 'temperature' are still rising: and rising no longer on the scale of the individual but now on that of the planet. This indication is so familiar to us that we cannot but recognize the objective, experiential, reality of a transformation of the planet 'as a whole.'" (from The Heart of Matter, 1950)

"Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then, for the second time in the history of the world, (hu)mankind will have discovered fire."

In the latter two he speaks of what VernorVinge calls TheSingularity (something de Chardin discusses even more explicitlyas the Omega Point). I call it TheNextSingularity, because i believe the universe has seen transitions of this scale before, and will again later. Also see SocialSingularity.

SisterSites links: Technomanifestos:Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin , Wiki:TeilhardDeChardin