What if the dinosaurs hadn’t been wiped out by an asteroid?

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs and changed the course of evolution. The skies darkened and plants stopped photosynthesising. The plants died, then the animals that fed on them. The food chain collapsed. Over 90% of all species vanished. When the dust settled, all dinosaurs except a handful of birds had gone extinct.

But this catastrophic event made human evolution possible. The surviving mammals flourished, including little proto-primates that would evolve into us.

Imagine the asteroid had missed, and dinosaurs survived. Picture highly evolved raptors planting their flag on the moon. Dinosaur scientists, discovering relativity, or discussing a hypothetical world in which, incredibly, mammals took over the Earth.

This might sound like bad science fiction, but it gets at some deep, philosophical questions about evolution. Is humanity just here by chance, or is the evolution of intelligent tool-users inevitable?

Brains, tools, language and big social groups make us the planet's dominant species. There are 8 billion Homo sapiens on seven continents. By weight, there are more humans than all wild animals.

We've modified half of Earth's land to feed ourselves. You could argue creatures like humans were bound to evolve.

In the 1980s, palaeontologist Dale Russell proposed a thought experiment in which a carnivorous dinosaur evolved into an intelligent tool user. This “dinosauroid” was big-brained with opposable thumbs and walked upright.

It's not impossible but it's unlikely. The biology of an animal constrains the direction of its evolution. Your starting point limits your endpoints.

If you drop out of college, you probably won't be a brain surgeon, lawyer or Nasa rocket