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Deep time

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Don't you look at James Hutton — James Hutton ain't gon' save you.
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Deep time is the idea, held to be credible by natural researchers since the early 19th century, that the Earth is millions or billions of years old, rather than the few thousand that young Earth creationism claims.

History

The concept was first formally proposed by James Hutton, a Scottish geologist, in 1788. Hutton and his various contemporaries challenged the then-standard concept of a 6,000 year old Earth by studying the geological strata and stating he could find no rational "beginning of time", if layers were consistently formed, a basis of Lyell's Uniformitarianism. The continuing process whereby rocks are eroded and new sedimentary rocks form out of the remains of older eroded rocks was previously known. Hutton, however, observed further this process takes so long that the Earth must be much older than a few thousand years.[1]

Evidence

See the main article on this topic: Evidence against a recent creation

Evidence for deep time includes:

Other uses

In cosmology, "deep time" can mean forecasts about the ultimate fate of the universe. Such forecasts often look trillions of years into the future,[2] many many times the universe's current age.

See also

External links

References