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“So, when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand)…” (Matthew 24:15, ESV).
Let’s go back several decades to a movie titled Stargate, which introduced us to a ring-shaped portal that unlocked near-instantaneous passage to uncharted, mind-boggling new worlds. The film’s tagline teased “the passage to discovery.” Fast forward to right now, and tech leaders aren’t just watching science fiction anymore—they are building it.
Uh, oh!
Microsoft® and OpenAI® have officially code-named their newest and most ambitious AI supercomputer initiative “Project Stargate.” It’s not a coincidence. Developers chose the name because they believe this project will be a literal gateway to the dawn of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—an intelligence even smarter than your average Pastor Grant: superintelligence.
Our new tech semi-gods openly say that the Stargate facility must be built for more “compute”—the raw horsepower necessary to break through the final barriers of human limitation. They aren’t just building a smarter Alexa® or a new Microsoft Editor®. Masayoshi Son, Chairman of the Stargate Project, has explicitly warned that the ultimate goal is to launch an intelligence 10,000 times smarter than any human.
Consider these staggering statistics about this active building project:
- Financial Gravity: The project’s cost will be $500 billion, roughly equivalent in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars to the entire construction cost of the U.S. Interstate Highway System.
- Power Demands: The facility will consume 5 gigawatts of power. While anything starting with a simple “5” doesn’t sound like much, we are talking gigawatts. The power feeding Stargate could simultaneously supply electricity for the cities of San Francisco, Atlanta, Seattle, Miami, and Denver combined—with a few watts left over for all the houses in your neighborhood.
- Hardware Density: The infrastructure will house millions of advanced chips. If you stacked this mountain of enterprise silicon hardware flat on top of each other, it would pierce straight into the clouds, matching the height of the Empire State Building.
Twenty-five hundred years ago, in the very last chapter of the Book of Daniel, the archangel Michael said to the prophet, “But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end. Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase” (Daniel 12:4).
Let’s pause and consider what it truly means when “knowledge shall increase.” Stargate will not only store and cross-reference every piece of human knowledge that can be digitized, but it will also have the autonomous capacity to generate novel knowledge—things entirely new and previously unknown to mankind.
If you summed up the grand total of accumulated, validated “new” knowledge that humanity took 7,000 years to discover, Stargate will be capable of generating that same volume in a matter of seconds. No wonder Daniel was told to shut up the words, and seal the book. What Michael described was completely beyond his ancient comprehension—and, if we are being completely honest, it is probably beyond ours, too.
While the 1994 film fictionalized our ability to step through a ring into unknown universes, the current Stargate project is preparing to do the exact same thing in reality. But what happens when the portal opens?
Will we wake up one morning to find the world under the total autonomous control of an artificial mind, wishing the Book of Daniel had stayed tightly shut?