Connor Martini Theory & Methods Final Paper 1 As We Know It: Discourses of Alienation in Comparative Eschatology The end of the world is a highly anticipated event. The religious hold on the particulars of the end of the world has lessened somewhat recently, as new entities are constantly inventing new ways of killing everyone on the planet. The 18 th and early 19 th Centuries, the peak of geopolitical Christian domination, were enchanted with the immanence of the eschaton as the Christian millennium manifested itself through the colonial project. 1 Jesus himself was expected to return any minute. In his stead arrived the World Wars and the atom bomb, all of which shattered this dream. As the Christian imperium lamented losing its grip on their Millennium, the doctrine of last things gained a democratized imaginative vigor. 2 The end times, it seemed, could possibly be manufactured. One such imagination becomes more tangible with each software update, smartphone release, and medical breakthrough; the eschaton of the technological Singularity. 3 Often maligned as the conspiratorial ravings of people who have seen Blade Runner a few too many times, the revelatory exegesis of singulatarians, those who believe in the coming Singularity, deserve to be reconsidered in a serious way. The singulatarian prophets are not tin-foil hat-clad paranoiacs; they are pioneers of computer science and leaders of the most influential and powerful technology companies. They even include a Jesuit priest in their earliest ranks. Mapping their prophetic works onto Christian eschatological models is one way in which the singulatarian eschatology can be thoughtfully considered, although that risks an intellectual deference to Christian thought as an archetypal standard by which emerging theories are measured. However, this examination, an attempt at comparative eschatology, is guided by an alternative theory; that we may be able to 1 Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 3. 2 Ibid., 5. 3 Typically, the Greek word “eschaton” refers to the culmination of the Christian apocalyptic model in which God’s consummation of the Earth is complete. This examination applies the term more liberally to denote any moment which may cause a total transformation of our reality.