1. This is foreseen as a future state of the Earth in which human consciousness, reaching the climax of its evolution, will have attained a maximum of complexity and, as a result, of concentration by total reflection (or planetization) of itself upon itself.
2. Contributing to development towards this state are: the appearance of a collective memory in which the common inheritance of mankind is amassed in the form of accumulated experience and passed on through education; the development, through the increasingly rapid transmission of thought, of what is in effect a generalized nervous system, emanating from defined centres and covering the entire surface of the globe; and the emergence, through the interaction and ever-increasing concentration of individual viewpoints, of a faculty of common vision penetrating beyond the continuous and static world of popular conception. In the terms of de Chardin, this is the movement of man towards the Omega Point, the highest evolution of the noosphere.