There was an unsettling feeling when I finished reading Childhood’s End by Arthur Clarke because of its idea: that humanity might one day meet a species so far beyond our understanding that people mistake them for gods or devils.

Arthur Clarke’s “Overlords” don’t destroy, enslave or invade the planet in the ways sci-fi usually warns us about. Instead, they arrive with calmness, power, and knowledge, assisting in changing the state of our world. But for some reason, they hide their appearance from the inhabitants of Earth.

And then there’s the twist: that these beings, with their dark, devilish appearance, have visited Earth before, explaining some of the myths and fears that shaped entire cultures. And being aware of what their appearance is associated with on this planet, they waited for the “right time” to show themselves to humans.

That idea is intriguing – that ancient stories of gods and demons weren’t imagination, but memories of misremembered contact with something so incomprehensible, that people turned it into religion.

It reminded me of 2001: A Space Odyssey, also based on Clarke’s ideas, where mysterious alien monoliths appear at key moments in human history, guiding evolution at each stage. The idea here was that human evolution itself may have been sparked by contact with a superior intelligence which didn’t dominate or even communicate, but acted through silent and deliberate influence.

These ideas offer the haunting suggestion that our place in the universe, or humanity’s idea of celestial beings, may not be what we think it is.

It makes me wonder how people decide what is divine, and how much of it is about what we can’t yet understand?