Science teaches us that you evolved from a spectacularly boring life in caves, in which your distant forefathers were illiterate hunter-gatherers who were forced to survive against the elements. Your ancient ancestors eventually became intelligent enough to invent the wheel, plant crops, domesticate animals, develop systems of trade, build sturdy shelters, and gather together in towns and cities.

Civilizations arose gradually, and we developed written language, mathematics, ceramics, metallurgy, astronomy, governments, laws, and religion.

We also worshipped gods. Virtually every culture on Earth reported some form of direct contact with advanced beings of significantly higher intelligence. Civilization, so we are told, did not arise randomly. We were taught how to speak, how to read, how to write, how to grow crops, build shelters, study the stars, and understand the universal language of science by sophisticated beings. Again and again, our own written records soberly tell the tale of advanced, human-looking people handing us these keys to knowledge. In many cases these people walked with us for hundreds if not thousands of years, governing the affairs of our world with the presumably divine right of kings. Some of these “gods” taught us to be more loving and forgiving of others, and helped originate our major religions—which may hold deep mysteries that few of us truly understand at this time. Other “gods” were nowhere near as kind or benevolent. They warred with each other, were petty and conniving, lied and deceived, and in many cases were overthrown and destroyed when their angry and betrayed subjects finally rose up against them.

Is it possible that these “gods” of antiquity were, in fact, extraterrestrial beings? This is a question that I have been publicly tackling for twenty years in a variety of forms, including my website, divinecosmos.com, my books The Source Field Investigations and The Synchronicity Key, and well over eighty different episodes of Ancient Aliens, the number one show on the History Channel, entering its tenth season at the time of this writing. Yet many are still acting like the priests who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope. The worldview most people now take for granted is nothing more than a belief system, much like any other religion. We defend our current scientific models like Bible-thumping zealots, claiming there is only one truth, and the magi of Science have all the answers.

Traditionally, skeptics have defended their belief systems by invoking science as the ultimate authority. This should be a confusing time for them, because those same authorities are continually changing the story. Everything we were taught to believe was quietly transformed on October 22, 2013, in a paper that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, without any major media publicity. A team of three scientists, led by Dr. Erik Petigura, used NASA’s Kepler telescope to study 42,000 nearby stars that are similar to our own sun. They were looking for moments when the brightness of each star plunged in a measurable way. These dimmings are caused when a planet crosses in front of the star. Petigura’s team found a total of 603 planets. Ten of them were Earth-sized and orbited in the “habitable zone”—where oceans can form because the planet is neither too hot nor too cold. Petigura’s team already had the data to tell them these ten planets likely had liquid water. When you combine two hydrogen atoms with one oxygen atom, you get water. NASA has already proven that stars give off countless tons of hydrogen and oxygen gas. When these gases reach a planet with the right temperature, they combine into water—and form atmospheres, rainfall, and oceans.

Petigura’s study concluded that an astonishing 22 percent of all Sun-like stars in the universe have watery, Earth-like planets orbiting around them—in the zone where life has the proper conditions to appear. The closest star with an Earth-like planet around it is only twelve light years away, making it easy to reach in one human lifetime if our technology advances to a point where we can travel at light speed. However, the real magic occurs when we take this 22 percent figure and extend it out into the known universe. The results are absolutely astonishing, and were summarized in an article entitled “The Fermi Paradox” on the website waitbutwhy.com.

There are an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone. We now know that for every star in the Milky Way, there is an entire galaxy in the universe. A galaxy is nothing but a huge grouping of stars. Once we are armed with these numbers, we can prove that for every grain of sand on Earth, there are ten thousand stars in the universe. That number alone seems impossible to comprehend, since we have thoughtlessly walked over countless grains of sand all of our lives. Our story gets even more outrageous once we estimate that 5 percent of those stars will be Sun-like, as NASA’s data has suggested. That means there are 500 quintillion, or 500 billion billion Sunlike stars in the universe.

Each of these Sun-like stars will have a “habitable zone” where a planet could develop oceans of liquid water. If 5 percent of all the stars in the universe are like our Sun, and Petigura’s team discovered that one-fifth of these stars will have Earthlike planets orbiting around them, then that means 1 percent of all the stars in the universe could be home to another planet we could live on. There would be 100 billion billion Earth-like planets in the cosmos. This means that for every single grain of sand on Earth, there are a hundred Earth-like planets in the universe. Based on these numbers, there are about a billion Earths in our own galaxy alone. If we then assume that only 1 percent of those watery worlds have developed some form of life, then every grain of sand on Earth represents an inhabited, Earth-like planet in the universe.

Let’s assume that a mere 1 percent of those inhabited planets have life that has evolved into an intelligent civilization, like what we now see on Earth. That would mean there are 10 quadrillion, or 10 million billion intelligent civilizations in our universe. When we apply this same logic to the Milky Way, we have 100,000 intelligent civilizations seeded among the billion Earth-like planets out there waiting for us. This is a radical re-envisioning of everything we think we know, coming directly from official sources working with NASA data. And with these numbers, the idea that we are alone in the universe becomes utterly ridiculous—akin to an extreme fundamentalist religious belief that is easily dismissed.

“The Fermi Paradox” also asks us to consider the age of the universe, currently estimated to be about 13 billion years. Earth was only formed 4.54 billion years ago. It is entirely conceivable that an Earth-like planet could have emerged 8 billion years ago around an older, Sun-like star. Now let’s imagine that this planet evolved to our current level of intelligence and technology in the same length of time that it took to flourish here on Earth—4.54 billion years. That would mean that this planet had 3.46 billion years to evolve beyond the level we have reached today. The degree of technology, intelligence, and sophistication that could occur during that time may be beyond our ability to even comprehend.

On March 5, 2015, NASA announced that nearly half of Mars was once covered with an ocean like those on Earth that was up to two miles deep. Then, on September 28, 2015, NASA revealed that Mars still has liquid water on its surface today, in limited quantities. Finally, on November 5, 2015, NASA announced that Mars once had an atmosphere like Earth’s that was wiped out, perhaps by some form of solar event. Pluto has an oddly Earth-like atmosphere. According to a BBC article from March 12, 2015, that quoted NASA, Jupiter’s moon Ganymede was found to have a subsurface ocean as well as a variety of other satellites: “These include the dwarf planets Pluto and Ceres; other Jupiter moons—Europa and Callisto; Saturn’s moons Enceladus, Titan and Mimas; and possibly Neptune’s moon, Triton. The Solar System is now looking like a pretty soggy place,” joked Jim Green, the US space agency’s director of planetary science.”

These official discoveries are changing everything we were taught to believe. There are multiple places within our own solar system that are suitable for life—in one form or another. Mars appears to have been Earth-like enough that an intelligent civilization could have thrived on it in our own past. These utterly lifechanging findings are being released here and there in the media, one at a time. They get a day or two of minor headlines, which are easily overlooked in today’s world of information saturation, and are then forgotten. By simply putting the pieces together, we can build a radically different worldview than what most people now believe to be the absolute truth.

Excerpted from The Ascension Mysteries: Revealing the Cosmic Battle Between Good and Evil © 2016, by David Wilcock, with permission of Penguin Random House LLC.

David Wilcock is an author, professional lecturer, and researcher of ancient civilizations, consciousness science, and new paradigms of matter and energy. His seminal thoughts and expertise on consciousness have reached hundreds of thousands of people through his extensive online presence at www.DivineCosmos.com. His first two books, The Source Field Investigations and The Synchronicity Key, were New York Times bestsellers.