Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit priest, philosopher, and paleontologist who lived in the first half of the twentieth century. In a book titled The Phenomenon of Man, he described how the Earth has evolved by a long series of explosive leaps. At each step there is a seed event, followed by a long period of ramification, or branching and fleshing out, that continues until it reaches its absolute limits. Then something nearly miraculous happens: the "sphere" of the present stage closes on itself and is completed; and the unique, unexpected seed of the next stage is generated from it. For example, the biosphere was seeded in the "pregnant" chemical soup of the fully mature hydrosphere (the oceans, which had formed atop the lithosphere, the layer of inorganic rock), and then ramified across the face of the Earth.

The biosphere gave rise to the noosphere, the sphere of man (literally, "sphere of thought"), which has been ramifying and maturing for several million years. With each newly accreted layer, Teilhard maintains, there is an increase in complexity and consciousness. While it might be arguable whether water is more sentient than rock (it’s certainly more fluid), it’s obvious that living creatures improved on the consciousness of water, and that we in turn are more aware than our progenitors. In fact, and this was a crucial development, says Teilhard, we are self-aware: we are life reflecting upon itself for the first time.

But this isn’t the end. The presently evolving sphere must also close and beget the next one, which Teilhard hesitates to name but which he describes as the sphere of completely interconnected mind, in which individual self-awareness will be superceded by all thought, and indeed all earthly life, becoming conscious of itself as a unified, indivisible entity.

We feel the intense stirrings of this new progeny in the womb of the present. Teilhard sensed it as long ago as the 1920s. He noted that with each successive evolutionary phase there was a "quickening," both of matter and of spirit (or awareness); and he predicted that the labor pains of the present age would quicken within a few decades to what he termed the "Omega Point" (the unification of the noosphere), and then Mother Earth would give birth again.