Human beings have done better at contemplating very long periods of time. In ancient Hinduism, the life span of a deva (minor god) was thought to be about 10,000 deva years, each deva year about 100 Earthly years, for a total of a million years. One day in the life of Brahma, the Creator God, was 1,000 deva lifetimes, estimated at about 4 billion years. That long time unit was called a kalpa. Evidently, these successively longer time scales were arrived at simply by multiplying the previous time scale by a few factors of ten, without any knowledge of the physical world. The Hindus believed in
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