What if the asteroid had missed Earth and dinosaurs still lived?

There is an interesting amount of conversation among paleontologists and geologists about what would have happened if the asteroid, which ended the era of the dinosaurs, had missed there’s now some evidence that that huge asteroid about six miles across, basically the size of a city, came from out near Jupiter, but there was no reason it had to hit the Earth. And most of these asteroids don’t hit the Earth. As it was, it now looks like that asteroid hit in the most dangerous possible area, which was a shallow part of the ocean, which allowed it to push all of the minerals on the bottom of the ocean up into the atmosphere, creating a cloud and creating an effect across the planet, which ended vegetation growing. And when the vegetation couldn’t grow, the dinosaurs that ate plants couldn’t eat, and when they couldn’t eat, the dinosaurs which ate, dinosaurs couldn’t eat, and you suddenly had one of the two or three greatest die offs in the history of the planet. Now, what if that asteroid had missed? There’s no reason to believe that the age of dinosaurs would have ended. And then you get into a really interesting question, and a number of very serious professional paleontologists have been exploring this. What would evolution have been like if, in fact, the age of the dinosaurs didn’t end? First of all, we know that dinosaurs were very competitive and that mammals were not able to compete very well with them. So the largest mammals that we find in the age of the dinosaurs are really about the size of a small dog. There’s no big mammal that was able to exist because the dinosaurs were simply better predators and better able to suppress them. So you would have had birds which were being successful and which basically are a branch of dinosaurs would have continued to flourish. They had the huge advantage of flight, and they would have gradually spread more and more complexly. There are more bird species than there are mammal species. There have been remarkably successful. We don’t see them that way because we value walking around on ground, and we undervalue flying, even though a very substantial number of mammals or bats and fly in a unique way, different than birds. So birds would have done all right. Dinosaurs would have done all right. They would have dominated. And humans, in fact, probably wouldn’t have existed. The reason simple, there was no evidence that the mammals could have ever grown into competing with the dinosaurs. And there’s a serious argument that the most effective of the hunting dinosaurs, animals called troudas, were also the smartest dinosaurs, and that over another 20 or 30 million years, they might have evolved in ways that we can hardly imagine, but it would not have been humans, and it would not have been life as we’ve known it.