Billions of years

I think one fact that can really unlock everything that puzzles us about what we call the paranormal is the age of the universe..

Let us not forget these basic facts.  Our planet is about 4.6 billion years old.  The universe is presently judged to be 13.7 billion years old.  And that's just this universe, which may be merely one of many.

Even if you restrict things to this universe, according to astro-biologists, life could first have arisen around 12 billion years ago.  Give a little time for life to become intelligent -- and maybe that is a longer process than we can imagine now, so for arguments sake, let's take 6 billion years just for that.  That would still mean intelligent life in the universe would have about 6 billion years on us.

6 billion years..

That's a lot of time, far more than we can imagine, being that our advanced technology is less than 100 years old, our culture can't be more than 10,000 years old, and our form only evolved 200,000 years ago.

Left to right, Neandertal, Homo Sapiens

In 6 billion years, the first, second, third, the billionth intelligent races to evolve could well be several billion years older than we are.

Just let that sink in for a bit.

Whatever technology they developed would be pure magic to us.

All the odd things that happen, that we cannot fathom could possibly exist with our own level of technological or scientific advancement, could easily be explained by a technology billions of years older than our own.

The very fact that this is so must make us pause to consider things that we have heretofore washed our hands of far too quickly.  Within the limits of our knowledge, we do not believe it is mere speculation that the universe could support life so many billions of years ago.  So long as this is so, we must take into account that there could very well be people out there billions of years more advanced than we are, and their form, their concerns, even their limitations may be nothing at all like our own.