If that asteroid had been 30 seconds late, dinosaurs might rule the world and humans probably wouldn’t exist

Location is everything, both for the owners and for the dinosaurs. When buying a home, finding a neighborhood you like near where you live is better for your long-term happiness than having an extra living room. And if you’re a Cretaceous dinosaur, having a giant asteroid crash in the middle of the ocean is better for your long-term survival than right off the coast of Mexico.

If that meteor had fallen half a minute later, it would have hit somewhere in the Atlantic or Pacific. Any location would have spawned killer waves (literally), but at least it wouldn’t have killed that many dinosaurs.

Birds are great and it would be nice to have some raptors walking around instead of chickens. However, they were still about the same height, so they wouldn’t reach the doorknobs if we’d placed them a little higher. These new findings were revealed in the BBC documentary The Day the Dinosaurs Died, in which scientists drill into an underwater crater. In 2016, geophysicists Jo Morgan of Imperial College London and Sean Gulick of the University of Texas drilled deep into the seafloor to learn more about the impact. Since then they have been analyzing the samples they brought with them.

The team gave numerous presentations at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in March 2017, but surprisingly, the news didn’t break out until their findings hit mainstream television.

Before we elaborate, it is important to note that there is no causal evidence here. One of the leading theories surrounding the mass extinction of non-avian dinosaurs is that there was (at least one) massive impact that caused a series of catastrophic impacts that wiped out most of the flora and fauna. But that happened 66 million years ago. Chicxulub crater off the coast of Mexico was dated to the same time, so the timelines match, but that’s situational data only.

And impact theory isn’t the only one. Paleontologists disagree on whether Chicxulub Crater was responsible for the mass extinction, although the data strongly supports the impact theory.Assuming that there was indeed a large impact that killed most of the dinosaurs, the meteorite responsible struck near the Yucatan Peninsula, kicking up dust of vaporized rock and sulfur dioxide. Sure, many feathered dinosaurs were killed by the force of an asteroid blast thrown at them—the equivalent of about ten billion atomic bombs the size of Hiroshima—but many later died.Let’s not forget the global cooling that started with all that sulfur dioxide.

Unlike greenhouse gases, sulfur dioxide has a crippling effect that caused many more deaths when the world began to freeze. The evaporated rock obscured the sun and brought with it more snow than anyone would have liked (cave: popular science cannot confirm that some Cretaceous species actually enjoyed snow. From what we know, they may have played and made snow angels). Many animals were unprepared for such a sudden cold (Canada Goose jackets hadn’t invented them yet), but do you know who it was? People. Well, not humans, but ancient mammalian ancestors of a lineage that will one day create humans.

And thank goodness, because after the dinosaurs were gone, our limp bodies and terribly helpless children were free to thrive. Our tiny mammalian ancestors survived a mega-earthquake, series of volcanic eruptions, and acid rain and watched most of the plants they ate die. And they lived to tell the story. Again not really as they probably lacked the language to get the story across. Modern prairie dogs can talk about t-shirt colors, but even they can’t tell why “almost everything went extinct back then.””Probably.

Our distant ancestors stood there alongside ancient crocodiles and sharks, and damn it, they won. We’ve since disappeared off the food chain, save for those trying to befriend those unholy killing machines: the bears. And all of that apparently wouldn’t have been possible if that meteor had appeared 30 seconds later. The early riser catches the worm but still longs for the worm.