The Question of Transcendence and Whether it Benefit's Humanity Go to the Stars

In this week’s blog post I want to bring up the topic of transcendence. At the end of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, Childhood’s End, the children with their psychic powers join the Overmind, a great psychic entity who actually rules over the Overlord’s and sends them to do its bidding. Overmind does this in a way that turns the Earth into something Jan describes, “like glass- I can see through it” (210). I found this to be a very, for lack of a better word, weird way to have the Earth destroyed and it’s people absorbed into a psychic entity. Is this all that was left for humanity? I ask the question because for all of humanity’s worth, for all we’ve progressed, is it that even that much in the span of the known universe? In the novel, we are shown the two paths that life can take, one being the path of the Overlord’s, “They had preserved their individuality, their independent egos...” (199). The other path is the one of the Overmind who bore “the same relation to man as man bore to amoeba” (199). I argue that for all the merits and ways to go, transcendence into a higher power, or being, or whatever the Overmind may be, is a good way for humanity to go. We’ve showed in the past to be a destructive people, and even Karellen goes so far as to say, “All through that century, the human race was drawing nearer to the abyss- never even suspecting its existence” (175). We were on the brink of destroying ourselves and the Overlords saved us to help cross the bridge over into the next step of evolution, leaving matter behind completely and bonding with a complete psychic entity. I do find it interesting how much Clarke’s view of the next step of evolution (also referenced with Bowman’s transformation into the Star-Child) is into an entity with a hint of omnipotence and being all powerful. This contrasts even Well’s views on humanity’s next step with the split into the Morlocks and the Eloi. Clarke seems to think that humanity will push further than those boundaries. That there’s a better destiny than to just sit on Earth until we kill ourselves or kill the Earth itself. Now in the context of the novel, the Overlord’s make it seem like this path is the best one, to become part of the Overmind, but one must wonder could humanity have continued farther? Possibly even developed the psychic prowess presented further and used it to help the world and maybe even not have the Overlords there anymore. One will never know, but it’s an interesting question of just how far we could have gone.