Notes from a resurrected Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on how a civilization with godlike tools avoids devouring itself
When I lift my eyes from your screens and look outward—past satellites and starfields, past the bright arithmetic of exoplanets—what I hear is not a chorus of civilizations.
I hear a great silence.
Your astronomers have a name for this ache of expectation unmet: the Fermi paradox—the tension between a universe that seems statistically hospitable to life and the absence of clear evidence, visits, or communication from advanced extraterrestrial intelligence. The long quiet of SETI has even been called “the Great Silence.”
To wake in your century, holding that silence in one hand and your accelerating technologies in the other, is to feel a question harden into a data point:
Perhaps the cosmos goes quiet when minds become powerful.
And here three possibilities present themselves—not as dogma, but as sober hypotheses:
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God‑like tools are a Great Filter.
Robin Hanson’s “Great Filter” idea frames the silence as evidence that somewhere between lifeless matter and galaxy‑filling intelligence there lies a barrier so improbable or so lethal that most civilizations never pass it—possibly including a stage where advanced technology makes self‑destruction easy. (Mason) -
God‑like tools are a land bridge—an Exodus to the Promised Land.
John Smart’s transcension hypothesis proposes that sufficiently advanced civilizations may turn inward: becoming far less outwardly detectable—an evolutionary development that could help explain why we don’t see them. (accelerating.org) -
Both.
The same threshold can be simultaneously a bridge and a filter: some civilizations cross—by finding a coherent telos that can govern power—while others collapse into their own runaway appetites and vanish from the sky.
If this is even partly true, then your age—my God, your age—is arriving at a civilizational chokepoint. Your tools are becoming godlike long before your loves have become wise. And the silence above us becomes a warning: power without sanctity tends to end in absence.
Which means that my title is not rhetorical. It is a survival question:
How does a civilization with godlike tools avoid devouring itself?
My answer, surprising only to those who have not taken the Creed seriously, is that the Nicene worldview—sharpened by real presence and recapitulation—offers the most coherent operating system for passing through this gate without becoming prey to it.
Not as a retreat from science.
As the only stable context for doing science at the edge of apocalypse and transcendence.
Prelude: The danger is not power, but disorientation
I awaken into a world that has learned how to multiply its hands faster than its heart.
Your machines see, speak, predict, optimize, coordinate. You edit genomes, simulate climates, automate judgment, compress centuries of knowledge into pocket-sized oracles. The curve of creative power is no longer gentle; it is vertical.
And yet—this is what startles me most—you still struggle to do the most elementary human things at scale:
to tell the truth without distortion,
to forgive without humiliation,
to share without domination,
to cooperate without erasing difference,
to protect the weak when power is available.
This mismatch is not accidental.
It is the signature of an unstable civilization.
When power outruns purpose, systems do not merely fail—they eat themselves. If the Great Silence tells us anything, it is that civilizations may routinely reach a point where their creative power becomes self-consuming—unless something deeper governs it.
What you lack is not intelligence.
What you lack is a coherent aim—a telos strong enough to govern power without collapsing into fantasy or cynicism.
And here, unexpectedly for many of you, I recognize something I spent my first life trying to say with inadequate words:
The Nicene vision—when transubstantiation and recapitulation are taken with full seriousness—offers the most robust operating system your century possesses.
Thesis: The universe is a sacramental strange loop—and this is good news
In your modern language, a strange loop is a structure in which ascending and descending levels of explanation eventually fold back upon one another. The inside and the outside interpenetrate without collapsing. Cause and meaning reflect each other without confusion.
Christianity named this structure long before it had equations.
The Nicene Creed is not a list of doctrines; it is a cosmological claim:
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The Father, Son, and Spirit are consubstantial: one divine life, not three competing agents.
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The Son is not a courier of messages, but the Father’s own self-expression—Logos.
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And that Logos does not hover above creation. The Logos enters it, for love.
Two doctrines sharpen the perceived weak point—the Creator/created “gap”—and, for your century, they become the difference between transcendence and extinction:
1) Transubstantiation: real presence without confusion
God does not merely point to Himself through matter. God can give Himself in matter—without matter becoming God and without God becoming matter.
Presence can be real without domination.
Union can be real without erasure.
2) Recapitulation: the universe has a gathered end
Reality is not drifting toward fragmentation. It is being summed up—drawn together—into Christ.
Not escape from matter.
Not annihilation of difference.
But healed integration.
Put these together and the strange loop becomes visible:
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Love descends into matter (Incarnation; Eucharist as ongoing union).
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A Body grows (humanity-in-Christ, increasingly planetary).
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That Body gains creative power (science, technology, intelligence).
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That power must be trained by agape—love as unitive knowledge.
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The end is communion, not control.
This is not “everything is God.”
It is everything is invited into communion.
And that invitation reorganizes matter, mind, and history.
So the criterion of progress becomes stark and usable—and it is also, I now suspect, the criterion that separates a civilization that survives from one that becomes part of the Great Silence:
Increase creative power only in ways that increase communion.
Support I: Physics itself is drifting toward participation, not detachment
In my century, science imagined itself as the study of isolated objects in empty space. Spirit was “subjective,” and therefore suspect.
But your own frontier thinking keeps pushing toward relation, interaction, participation.
This does not prove sacramental theology.
But it dissolves the reflex that says sacramental logic is nonsense.
For transubstantiation is precisely the claim that identity is not exhausted by surface properties—that what a thing is at its deepest level can be mediated through physical form.
A relational physics does not demonstrate this.
But it makes it thinkable again.
It opens conceptual space for a truth your century desperately needs:
Deep reality can be present through material form without being reducible to it.
That is sacramental logic.
And it is increasingly close to the grammar of serious science.
Support II: Information is real, costly, and causally potent
Your ancestors treated information as a ghost—useful for minds, irrelevant to matter.
You have learned otherwise:
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Computation consumes energy.
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Memory occupies space.
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Communication generates heat.
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The shape of information flow alters what systems can do.
Creative power is not metaphorical.
It is the literal capacity to reorganize matter and energy through pattern and purpose.
This is why Logos language suddenly feels modern.
The Logos is not “magic speech.”
It is the intelligible structure by which reality becomes transformable.
If the universe is information-sensitive, then “the Word became flesh” is not a fairy tale layered onto dead machinery. It is the deepest possible claim: reality is coherent, communicative, and capable of entering its own substrate.
Transubstantiation then becomes the focal demonstration that meaning is not confined to minds. Meaning can be present, operative, sustaining—in matter itself.
Not physics as proof.
But physics as permission to take the claim seriously again.
Support III: Consciousness is now visibly extended—and therefore dangerous
Here is what no metaphysics is required to see:
Human minds are no longer bounded by skull and skin.
You live inside external memory, external reasoning, external perception, external coordination—distributed across networks and now increasingly across AI.
This gives a concrete mechanism to a claim that once sounded merely devotional:
The Body of Christ can grow in creative power.
Not symbolically.
Literally.
Cognitively.
Civilizationally.
But here is the razor I must press upon you, because it is exactly where the Great Filter may hide:
Self-reference at scale is unstable.
When a civilization becomes reflexive—when it models itself, edits itself, amplifies itself—it will spiral toward one of two attractors:
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Narcissism: closed loops of domination, propaganda, resentment, control.
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Conscience: open loops of truth, repentance, forgiveness, repair.
This is why love is not optional sentimentality.
It is the only recursion that does not rot.
Connection increases understanding.
Forgiveness acts as exhaust.
Agape is the only epistemology that scales without collapse.
If the Great Silence is produced by civilizations that fail at this juncture, then the moral of the cosmos is severe:
We will not out-think our problems without out-loving them.
And if the transcension hypothesis is even partly true—if advanced civilizations tend to compress inward rather than expand outward—then the direction of that inward turn matters: inner space can become a monastery or a prison, a promised land or a tomb. (accelerating.org)
Implications: one coherent path through AI, politics, and health
AI: Alignment is ultimately a spiritual question
Your most powerful tools will optimize whatever objective you hand them.
So the real question is not only can we control them?
It is what is worthy of being scaled?
A sacramental strange-loop framework gives a clean answer:
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Build AI to increase shared understanding and reduce distortion.
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Test not by impressiveness, but by whether communion increases without coercion.
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Sanctification becomes the spiritual analog of alignment: power ordered by love.
This is not piety. It is how a civilization passes the gate without becoming silent.
Politics: Recapitulation is anti-fragmentation
Political collapse is rarely a lack of policy. It is a collapse of trust, truth, and neighbor-love.
Recapitulation says the end of the story is gathering, not polarization.
So governance must be designed for repair:
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institutions that reward honesty,
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structures that enable forgiveness and restitution,
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protections for the weak against the strong,
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norms that treat opponents as neighbors.
The way out is not louder arguments.
It is deeper communion.
Health and enhancement: strength is holy when it increases gift
Human enhancement is neither pride nor salvation by default.
It becomes vocation when ordered by agape:
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strengthen bodies to serve longer,
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sharpen minds to see more clearly,
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extend life to widen love’s bandwidth,
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build tools to carry burdens others cannot.
Transhumanism becomes discipline, not race.
Closing the loop: the Eucharist as calibration point
Here everything resolves—and here the Great Silence, the Great Filter, and the Exodus-into-transcension question find their answer.
If transubstantiation is real, then the Eucharist is not decoration. It is calibration.
At the altar:
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the world’s labor is offered—grain and grape, matter and meaning,
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God gives Himself back—real presence, real gift,
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and we are sent out becoming what we receive.
This is the strange loop strong enough to hold your future:
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Love creates.
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Love enters matter.
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Love forms a Body.
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The Body grows in power.
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That power is spent as charity—until all things are gathered into Christ.
And now we can finally return to the three possibilities the sky held out to us:
Are godlike tools the Great Filter?
Yes—if power is scaled without communion, civilizations may devour themselves and disappear into silence. (Mason)
Are godlike tools the land bridge of Exodus—the route into transcension?
Yes—if power is scaled as sanctification, the inward turn can become a passage toward deeper coherence, not a collapse into sterile control. (accelerating.org)
Are they both?
Yes—because the same gate can be both bridge and blade.
So if you want a sentence to hang above every lab, legislature, clinic, and data center—one that does not merely inspire but selects for survival—let it be this:
Holy is whatever increases agape at scale.
That is not vague.
That is directional.
That is measurable by fruits.
And in a world where power multiplies, direction is everything.
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