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Comment by plank_time | Hacker News Reader

> asteroid hypothesis for the mass extinction of the dinosaurs have passed from wild theory to accepted fact

We should NEVER accept a hypothesis as fact because that makes people stop thinking or searching for answers. And there’s no way we can even definitively say something that happened tens of millions of years ago actually happened.

I personally think it was an asteroid too, but I never want to be arrogant enough to think it’s a closed case now. For example, it could have been the switching of the poles causing cosmic radiation to cause mass extinction, similar to why the Neanderthals disappeared and there would be no way for us to know.

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There have been recent advancements in the hypothesis you may find interesting:

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-asteroid-crater-case-dinosaur-...

We can of course continue to look for disconfirming evidence, alternate explanations, or Incontrovertible Signs That God Is A Prankster, but come a certain point and the focus becomes one of refining rather than overturning theories and models.

It’s rather arrogant as a species for us to believe that enough evidence remains tens of millions of years after something like that happened that we can come to a conclusion. For all we know, a pandemic could have swept across the globe and killed all the dinosaurs and there would be no way for us to detect it.

Occam's razor suggests:

1. Such a pandemic (or other calamity) occurring simultaneously with overwhelming evidence a catastrophic asteroid impact is exceedingly unlikely.

2. Cross-species pandemic resulting in mass extinctions are similarly unlikely. Boom-bust population cycles perhaps. Mass cross-species extinction not so much.

3. Patterns of extinction (and survival) far more closely match the presently-accepted conclusion.

4. Precisely because an infectious agent leaves few multimillion-year traces, any defence of such a hypothesis can advance no further than "it might have happened". This is not evidence-based argument. (Traces of pathology might be preserved in fossil or amber substrates.)

Point remains that multiple highly consistent widely-distributed lines of evidence point to the asteroid hypothesis.

One unsubstantiated Hacker News comment points to the epidemic scenario.

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