A radical vision of prehistory, which Geroulanos charts, emerged in the unlikely world of Roman Catholicism.
It was crafted by the French Jesuit priest ⭐️Pierre Teilhard de Chardin⭐️who spent the 1920s and 1930s digging in Zhoukoudian, China, where paleontologists believed they had discovered the bones of the first humanlike hominid (known at the time as the “Peking Man” and now cataloged as Homo erectus).

In a stream of idiosyncratic texts, Teilhard claimed that all matters, both physical and spiritual, were equal parts of God’s cosmic unity.
No element or creature was superior to another: Humans, fish, and clouds were linked in one destiny.

In Teilhard’s telling, this meant that humanity’s emergence in prehistoric times (against the church’s formal position, he accepted evolution theory) was but a passing stage in the world’s broader progression.
Rather than being God’s chosen species, who could mindlessly plunder the globe’s resources,
humans had to put their unique ability to think and speak in the service of their surroundings.

Teilhard optimistically prophesied that humanity would ultimately be superseded when all existence would converge in what he called “the Omega point.”
At that stage, all creatures would achieve a mystical unity with God and overcome their limitations.

All of this is abstract and fantastical, but Teilhard’s ideas resonated with readers who hoped to create a more just and equal world.
Many thinkers, politicians, and activists found in his narratives of humanity’s genesis a way to imagine new solidarities (and they subverted the Vatican’s ban on his works by printing and circulating them privately).
As historian Sarah Shortall has recently shown, the most important of those was 🔸Léopold Sédar Senghor, 🔸the anti-colonial and anti-racist poet who rose to become Senegal’s first elected president.
Senghor, who was also a devout Catholic, claimed that Teilhard’s work offered a new horizon beyond racism and exploitation.
It explained how humanity’s deep past could lead it toward “a new humanism,” in which “all races” and “all nations” lived as equals.
More recently, with the onslaught of climate change, environmentalists have drawn on Teilhard to articulate a vision of a sustainable future.
For them, his narration of humanity’s origins explains what we owe the world around us.
Rather than a separate species, we can understand ourselves as equal members in a vast and diverse biosphere.
#Teilhard #OmegaPoint #Senghor
https://newrepublic.com/article/181262/abuses-prehistory-beware-study-earliest-ancestors

The beginning is the end is the beginning...
@medium

Many thanks @dlarkin121 and The Lark!

#OmegaPoint #Singularity #Life #Death #StringTheory #Infinity #QuantumPhysics
https://medium.com/the-lark/we-carry-inside-the-light-of-dead-stars-db0876711fe6

Panspermia is fascinating in real life and science fiction alike, its links with the Omega Point and the Alpha Point even more so.

Read more at my blog: https://www.adamasnemesis.com/2020/11/24/panspermia-the-alpha-and-the-omega/

This post's featured image is "Falling Star" by Witold Pruszkowski (1884).

#panspermia #omegapoint #alphapoint #bigbang #scifi #sciencefiction #spaceopera #science #alienlife #aliens #alienintelligence #blog