Oceans of the Solar System - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 214

into a Western world where most people still believed the Sun, the
Moon and everything else in the skies was circling the Earth at the
very centre of creation, at the centre of the universe. Science was in its
infancy, and it was not unusual for a university professor to be at once
mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer.
Within a year of the Dutchman Hans Lippershey's invention of the
telescope in 1608, Galileo had built his own rudimentary telescope
and pointed it towards the heavens. Galileo observed the mountains
of the Moon, the moons of Jupiter, and the crescent phases of Venus.
His observations led him to support the heretical ideas of Copernicus,
and so sealed the fate of the Sun-centred solar system. They also
famously drew the attentions of the Inquisition—and Galileo lived
out his final years in house imprisonment. But what were the planets
like? The telescopes of the day gave little clue as to the nature of those
distant worlds.
That did not stop speculation. The ferocious workaholic (typically
being at his desk some 14 hours each day) George-Louis Leclerc, the
Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), was arguably the first scientist to stretch
time, as well as space, in invoking past geological epochs of an Earth
for which he ascribed the then unthinkable age of 75,000 years—far
beyond the few thousand years that could be derived from study of
the Bible. As with Galileo's insights, it was a revolutionary step—and
as such it also attracted the criticism of the religious establishment of
the day. Buffon, though, avoided Galileo's fate. He had considerable
influence, and considerable diplomacy too—something that was lack-
ing in the more hot-tempered Galileo (privately, Buffon thought that
the Earth might be as old as 3 million years, but he wisely kept this yet
more outlandish figure to his personal notebooks).
Buffon considered the Earth—and the other planets too—to be
cooling fast, and that they went through a similar history in which the
planetary surface cooled, oceans formed, complex carbon-based life