Has humanity always been destined to join the Borg?: BrainFi Gets in Your Head

BrainFi Gets in Your Head

Spoiler alert for a 73-year-old novel: Childhood's End closes with Earth's children joinging a massive Overmind. 

That was and is — according to Arthur C. Clarke's book — always the inevitable fate of humanity. Once we developed enough, our consciousness would ascend up into this massive mass mind that's slowly taking over the universe. Physicality is not the end. Physicality is the handmaiden of pure consciousness. 

It's a horrifying ending really to our current way of thinking. 

There's a reinterpretation of it in a book I'm reading now. In The Others by D.W. Pasulka, she reframes the novel as a prophecy about what the internet is doing to humanity. She juxtaposes it with Marshall McLuhan who basically makes the same argument. The message of the medium is what it does to us, and he foresaw electronic media fusing our minds, till we didn't care about privacy and identity any longer. 

I listened to this book a few years ago as an audiobook, and found it absolutely gripping. It squared with how I think about visits from other planets. I suspect that if another species can cross interstellar space, it won't be violent. Anything that can make it that far fast enough to make it worthwhile won't be short of any resources. 

Robbing and pillaging doesn't make any sense as a motivation.

Childhood's End captures that but it takes it so much further. It's maybe the grand-daddy of BrainFi. 

I will update this post one of these days when I've gone through it again. I remember there were some specifics that really got me going the first time I went through it. 

Let me close for now with an image: Early on in the book, when the first aliens show up, they announce that they are taking over human affairs. Though, by and large, they prove to be hands off rulers. But they forbid certain things.

One of the things the new rulers forbid is cruelty to animals, but, not long after the edict, people in Spain attempt to hold a bull fight. Once the fans are all assembled in the stadium for the spectacle, the new rulers punish them.

The way they punish the spectators is what's compelling. They don't kill them. They don't bomb the stadium. The way I remember it, the aliens just give all those assembled a very bad feeling. 

• I think I'm forgetting some details here, so I might update this on a re-read. But that's how I remember it.

What power. They don't have to kill you. They can just make you feel absolutely terrible about what you're doing. Incredible. Imagine. 

—Brady Dale
October 15, 2026