The End of Earthly Oceans - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 193

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The End of Earthly Oceans
When will the world end? In some religions apocalypse is just around
the corner, and we have to prepare for it, and for the next and better
world that awaits. In others—Hinduism and Buddhism, for instance—
the timescale is unutterably vaster, and equates to many billions, and
perhaps trillions, of years. For the Comte de Buffon, writing the
world's first scientific Earth history text in pre-Revolutionary France,
the world was set to freeze in a few thousand years, with the evil day
a little forestalled by humanity's burning of coal. A little later, James
Hutton, Scottish landowner and savant, discovered the abyss of deep
geological time, in seeing evidence in strata of mountain belts first
built and then worn down to their roots. Famously, he mirrored the
Buddhist and Hindu timescales in seeing, for the Earth, no vestige of
a beginning or prospect of an end.
But the universe, we now know, began 13.8 billion years ago in the
Big Bang, while our solar system, and the Earth, are just 4.6 billion
years old. On the timescale of modern science, what prospects do we
have? Will oceans last until the end of the Earth? Or will the Earth's
old age be parched and arid? If so, it may become a planet that we
might not recognize, were we to take a trip there in that old time-
travelling telephone box. Indeed, we might be well advised not to
open the doors.