The eschaton is the end of the world as we know it. while the word itself is very old [according to the OED, eschatology is the the department of theological science concerned with the four last things: death, judgement, heaven, and hell] it has acquired a recent connotation: the end of the world brought on by increasing technology, communication, and connectedness: a singularity or omega point.

Terence McKenna has this to say (original here)

An interesting thing about this concatenation of connectedness is that each stage of its condensation took place more rapidly than the stages that preceded it. At its birth the Universe was as a pure plasma, there were no atomic systems; there was so much energy within the system that electrons either did not yet exist or were unable to settle into stable orbits. Then, as the Universe cooled, atomic systems began to form; stars condensed and through nuclear chemistry cooked up heavier elements, from which eventually developed a carbon based chemistry. This opened the possibility of molecular chemistry-new realms of connectedness-a new proliferation of opportunity for novelty. This opportunity led to life, to higher animals, to culture and eventually and comparatively recently to culture and epigenetic coding systems such as language and even more recently writing. The legacy of the conservation of connectedness is the meta-connected chaostrophy of Twentieth Century planetary culture. My model-building has sought to unify all of these diverse phenomena and to treat them as manifestations of a single set of laws; laws which describe the ingression of novelty into time And its conservation and concentration in ordinary space/time and ordinary immediate experience.

he uses Alfred North Whitehead's definition of novelty (original here):

Creativity is the principle of novelty. Creativity introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The creative advance is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates. The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the 'many' which it finds and also it is one among the disjunctive ' many' which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesises. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively 'many' in process of passage into conjunctive unity... Thus the 'production of novel togetherness' is the ultimate notion embodied in the term concrescence. These ultimate notions of 'production of novelty' and 'concrete togetherness' are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence. The analysis of the components abstracts from the concrescence. The sole appeal is to intuition. (Process and Reality, p. 26)

Did you understand that? I'm still thinking about it. It sounds like he's talking about emergence more than anything else. Maybe I should read the book...

Though I think McKenna is crazy in many ways I think the basic idea of increasingly increasing novelty/life/complexity is correct. The fundamental question: what is the topology of the curve? Some predict it becomes infinite in finite time (in 2012 in McKenna's case), this is a singularity. But this injection of the infinite is a religious assertion, just like Tipler's Omega point.

Feigenbaum and Jumping Jesus.

I see no reason for this. To me, the curve appears exponential. This has the important property of scale-neutrality: no matter where you are on the curve (ie no matter what age you live in) it looks the same. Everyone always thinks they live on the verge of great change, because relative to their past, they are! Until we approach the physical limits of computation and energy (if there are any) I see no reason for this to change.

Hans Moravec has some cogent words about the future, see Pigs in Cyberspace and these excerpts from The Age of Mind: Transcending the Human Condition through Robots: one and two.