Alpha Omega

The title comes from a famous biblical phrase in Revelation 1:9. This is the same verse that inspired Cathiolic mystic Teilhard de Chardin, who named his theory after the "Omega Point", and the message is basically an atheist improvement on Teilhard, so I don't think that's an accident.

The only thing a person needs to reach their potential is someone who believes in them, so the only thing humanity needs is someone who believes in humanity. Peter puts in more of a new-age pop-psych way than Teilhard would have, but it's the same idea.

To Teilhard, this someone who has faith in humanity is God. And what we eventually evolve into is God, the very same God who back in the present was, back in the present, influencing us to evolve by having faith in us.

To Peter, it's just present-day humans whose faith in humanity matters directly. You don't need to be perfect to make a difference by believing in a child, so why should anyone think we need to be perfected before we can make a difference by believing in humanity? Maybe we can only make small, finite differences, but they can and do add up, and that's all we need.

The crayfish bit is the boiling frog fable beloved by philosophers, but turned on its head. (No idea why he also changed the frog to a crayfish.) Usually it's a warning about the danger of not noticing gradual changes for the worse, but Peter's reminding us that we also fail to notice gradual changes for the better. And if you keep that in mind, you start to notice the little ways you really are improving the world, which is all you need to keep that self-fulfilling faith in humanity.

As it turns out, if you actually do gradually boil a frog, it definitely will notice. Most species will try to jump out of the water at only around 25°C. If you prevent it from jumping out, it will keep trying harder the hotter it gets. Long before you get to boiling, or meat-cooking temperature, it will reach critical thermal maximum and start flailing around chaotically, probably killing itself from overexertion. But the boiling frog still works as a metaphor even if it's useless as science.