Last week, a friend told me that he was losing sleep over the possibility of an “A.I. apocalypse.” His story made me wonder whether worrying about Doomsday has gone mainstream, beyond the febrile realms of Reddit and Twitter. My friend falls into the odd online rabbit hole from time to time, but he is not a news junky, nor an intellectual, nor even a technophile. He has a normal job and a loving family. But he knows how to read, and he’s read about the former Anthropic employee who warned, “Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” and he knows how to use Google, so he probably he has stumbled across the famous line by Sam Altman: “I think that A.I. will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world.” My friend is also likely aware that even the vice president has recently speculated about the end of the world: “Do I think that we’re in the end times? I don’t know, and I think that it’s probably bad for me spiritually to focus too much on it, because there are, like, things you got to do.”

I also have many things I have to do. But my own sleep is not untroubled by apocalyptic thoughts. Am I the only one who remembers when a Russian incursion into Western Europe meant nuclear war? Almost every day now, governments warn about autonomous drones, “hybrid attacks,” “grey zone warfare,” and sabotage. The airport in Luxembourg was recently shut down because of mysterious drone activity. So was the one in Leipzig. The French government recently announced that it will stand up to Russian aggression, but without “entering into a state of belligerence.” A lot seems to depend on figuring out a way for nations to fight each other without “entering” into “belligerence.”

Another man troubled by the end times is Peter Thiel, co-founder of the A.I. defence company Palantir, who has been lecturing widely, behind closed doors and off the record—even in Rome—about the antichrist. (A friend of mine snatched a ticket to one of these lectures, and he went with a rosary in his pocket.) According to Thiel, it is not A.I. which will usher in the end times, but rather a global effort to regulate A.I. The would-be regulators will create a world government, Thiel predicts, and this world government will be ruled by the antichrist. Thiel’s ideas, along with those of preppers, cult leaders, and various other doomers, are of course subject to much criticism, some of whom say they are rooting for the very things they claim to oppose. The authors Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein recently coined the term “End Times Fascism” to describe this coalition: a disparate group of people who fear a civilization-ending cataclysm and hope to survive it through the creation of a totalitarian state.

The notion of “surviving” the end of the world, however, suggests an ambiguity in the term. By definition, the Second Coming is something that nobody can escape. It is the divinely ordained endpoint of history. But an earthly cataclysm that ends millions of lives, ruins most of civilization, and forces human beings back to a pre-industrial way of life—that can be survived, in theory, by people who have prepared to do so. But there’s also a fascinating third category: those who expect not cataclysm, nor the Second Coming, but something in between—a new revelation, a communication from something not necessarily divine in nature, but certainly not human. (To give it the Yeats touch: “Surely some revelation is at hand . . .”) People in this third category may wonder if those drones flying over Luxembourg airport are actually aliens.

With this third group in mind, this past summer I picked up Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End, published in 1953. It’s uncommon for childhood fantasies to re-emerge in adulthood as an aspect of reality, but the sudden mainstreaming of U.F.O. conspiracy theories has got my thinking back on old fascinations. As a child I watched Star Trek and the Twilight Zone. Today, I could find similar stories about space ships, extra-terrestrials, and government coverups in a live broadcast of a congressional hearing about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (of which there have been six since 2022), or by rifling through the federal government’s latest release of grainy U.F.O. footage (six data dumps so far in Donald Trump’s second term). From helpful sources (podcasts, Wikipedia, and Reddit), I learned that Arthur C. Clarke’s classic is considered a quasi-prophetic text by many in the U.F.O. community. They say that the book holds the key to understanding not only U.F.O.s, but the rise of A.I. and the globe-straddling power of the internet. It is, in the words of D. W. Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, a “road map for the contemporary digital era.” And so I had to read it.

The novel takes place in the near future, after a race of technologically superior aliens—the Overlords—has descended upon the Earth. They proceed to bring health and safety to humanity, unifying it under one world government, and using their technology to solve all economic, agricultural, social, and political problems. They also deploy remote viewing tech to debunk all religions, allowing anyone who’s curious to peer into the past and verify for themselves whether the events recorded in sacred scriptures really took place. (We are never told if the remote viewing tech is reliable.) The Overlords do not intend to conquer or destroy humanity. They are intergalactic midwives, preparing the human race for their next big evolutionary leap: the absorption of all individual minds into one big, intergalactic consciousness called the Overmind, which bestrides the galaxy like a behemoth.

In her book The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny, Pasulka examines four figures—Marshall McLuhan, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, René Girard, and Mark Stahlman—who, she believes, were prophets of our current apocalyptic moment. All foresaw that technology would create a new moment in human history, when our consciousness would become a unified, global entity. Something big—if not the Second Coming, then something close to it—would happen. Pasulka believes that Childhood’s End depicts an evil version of this future. (For much of the novel, the Overlords hide themselves; when they finally appear, they resemble demons.)

But this is not the only way of seeing it. In another recent book, Unidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the World, the philosopher James M. Madden conceives of “the end of the world” as simply the end of our civilization’s limited understanding of what the world is, accompanied by shocking new information about it. There is more to the world than we know, and whatever U.F.O.s might be—Madden doesn’t believe they’re little green men—they are playing a role in disabusing us of our prejudices.

Given the quasi-gnostic nature of Childhood’s End—human beings become Pure Mind and leave their bodies behind—it might be surprising to hear that C. S. Lewis called it an “ABSOLUTE CORKER” in a letter. “Here we meet a modern author who understands that there may be things that have a higher claim than the survival or happiness of humanity,” he wrote. And he paid the book what, in his mind, must be one of the highest possible compliments: he called it a “myth.”

We are almost brought up out of psyche into pneuma [spirit]. I mean, his myth does that to us imaginatively. Of course his own thoughts about what that higher level might be are not, in our eyes, very new or very profound: but that doesn’t really make so much difference.

What does make a difference—what makes Clarke’s story great—is, for Lewis, the fact that Clarke can imagine a transcendent destiny for humanity. The book is about a new revelation. In Lewis’s view, it is a strangely hopeful tale.

But what I find delightful, and a little shocking, about Childhood’s End is not its mythical tone but its notes of realism. The story, for the most part, depicts the actions of normal people in various leadership positions around the world, responding to the Overlord’s takeover of the human race. Some are skeptical of the Overlords, others hostile. But most just get along with the work of managing the transition to a new stage in human development. The kind of “hard” science fiction that Clarke specialized in was never completely about a fantasy world; it was always an extrapolation of current trends and possibilities. What’s happening today is similar: more and more people have come to believe that the unthinkable and fantastical are becoming possible.

A less abstract way to put it would be that, in a more normal time, a middle-aged man who can’t sleep at night is usually only worried about his own future and his own destiny, even if he thinks he’s worried about the end of the world. Today, however, he has good reason to suspect that his own destiny is tied up with a bigger story. Surely some revelation is at hand, though who can say what it is.