Buffon thought that there may have been a natural (not God) cause to Earth's creation, such as the collision of the Sun with a comet. He also estimated Earth's age by calculating how long it would take an Earth-sized object to cool from the temperature of the sun. His estimates of 75,000 years were wrong, but this was much greater than 6000.
A visual chronology of Asimov's ~1500 scientific inventions and discoveries.
