Imagine life as we know it ending in a single day. Regardless of the weather, the situations we find ourselves in, or whatever, we assume that life will go on. The biggest difference between the dinosaurs and humans in the current day is that if humans saw something growing closer to the earth they’d no doubt panic and wonder what we could possibly do. For all intents and purposes, dinosaurs didn’t have that luxury or that grasp of what an object such as a comet would have been. We’re assuming most of this even if science is telling us that this is what would have happened. It’s easy for humans to believe that dinosaurs had no idea of their impending doom. Why would they? For millions of years, they’d lived much the same as they always had, and there was no reason to think that anything would change. Like it or not, humans are the same even we do recognize our own fragility. Plus, humans are great at scaring each other when it comes to mortality, so great that some people don’t care to think about it that often.
But the idea of an asteroid taller than Mt. Everest hitting the ocean and dispelling the water for kilometers in all directions is a terrifying one for many people since the amount of force needed to do this is going to keep pushing and pushing until something pushes back, adding its own force to the mix as the earth responded in a violent and unprecedented manner. Morbid as it sounds, there’s no doubt that nothing living understood what was happening before the flash of white and the near-disintegration of their bodies from the sheer amount of heat that blew past and through them. The temperatures that radiated from the point of impact would have likely burned everything to a crisp, and as the shockwaves continued to roll outward one can only imagine the hellscape that would have come with them as the surrounding lands were likely buried beneath the waves or fried from the liquid magma that had been drawn up from beneath the surface.
There wouldn’t be any great understanding at that point, the main reaction would be to run, fly away, or find cover of some sort to escape the unknown source of heat and pain that was spreading throughout the land. As the world around them crumbled, burned, and opened up to swallow them whole, the dinosaurs were likely unaware of what was happening and didn’t have that much time to react. It’s usually shown in movies that when there’s a natural threat that animals will sense it far in advance and start moving away from the disturbance. If such a thing happened this time then it was still likely that the dinosaurs had no idea why so many creatures were acting strangely. Without any basis for such behavior, it would be hard to figure out what had prompted the mass exodus that we always see in the movies when animals sense that something bad is coming. That’s assuming that this did happen though since there are likely a lot of fine details that this broad explanation is leaving out.
It covers enough though to get the idea that things went downhill very quickly and the earth as the dinosaurs knew it had changed in a very short time. Many species went extinct very quickly, while those that managed to survive had to change over time to survive in the harsh climates that were left in the wake of the asteroid. Much of what has been pieced together from those times is guesswork that has been impacted by research and whatever findings that archaeologists and other individuals have discovered. Trying to dispute anyone when talking about any claim is bound to be met with extreme derision simply because the nature of the world we live on is something that many individuals believe they have a firm grasp on, and it’s likely that a good number of them are right.
But the sudden erasure of so much is hard for many people to fathom since eliminating so many in such a small amount of time is hard to grasp, especially since today it would mean that billions of people would perish, no matter how well-prepared humanity might be. The sad part of this is that humanity appears set to be the cause of our downfall at this time, meaning that an asteroid might actually just finish the job with an exclamation point. That’s a bit dark for such a nice day, but the idea that we understand our mortality is correct, and while the dinosaurs might have had some understanding of death and its passing, it’s fair to state that they had no idea what was about to happen, especially after living in a world where such events didn’t happen all the time.
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