The Omega Point in Science Fiction

The Omega Point* is a significant spiritual concept that pervades (unnoticed, for the most part) in our culture, many religions, some scientific circles and most definitely in a lot of great science fiction.

I think the best example of the Omega Point in literature can be found in Isaac Asimov's classic tale, The Last Question. It isn't a long read: if you've got a minute, go there.

As charming and well written as many of the Omega Point-type stories are, they also all contain a persistent and strange combination of naivete and dystopia. Although the godlike evolution of mankind is presented as a wonderful and expansive rise in our history, why are my favorite characters in The Last Question the two drunk scientists who are most closely identified with "modern" (i.e. "no further evolved than the present") people? Why does the near-godhood that mankind develops over billions of years seem not just alien, but neuter, bland, and without identity?

On the one hand, the story would have us believe that advancement on the evolutionary scale is a net good, racing against the universe's immenent doom. But when I read it, I become less and less emotionally attached to the characters who eventually become pawnlike subjects of the "Mind"/"Computer"/Omega Point. I think it would be just nifty if they all blew up. Which they do.

No one resists the Multivac or its descendants? No one thinks independently of the enormous, world-saving device?

The Omega Point holds a lot of science fiction writers in thrall, but its weaknesses seem to have caught up with it. Although it has been the source of some great stories in the past, the theory has run out of literary gas. There's a reason why Piltdown Man doesn't show up in science fiction today at all, whereas in another era, the fellow appeared in all sorts of weird tales, even some classics. Piltdown Man was a fascinating concept exposed over time to be unreliable. The same is true for the hope of verifiable, historical, and real Omega Point.

*I'm speaking hear of the concept advanced by Pierre Tielhard de Chardin - that mankind (and all matter, really) is evolving to a point of supreme complexity, by which all things will merge to a supreme collective consciousness, or Omega Point. Think 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Omega Point pre-exists the Big Bang, and is also an idealized evolutionary state in the future. One of the basic assumptions is that man is improving exponentially over time, physically, technologically and even ethically.** There are applications of the term "Omega Point" in other fields that are unrelated to the spiritual concept of the same name.

**Which doesn't exactly account for the Khmer Rouge, but that is another subject for another day.