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I could have titled this Blog “When One Door Closes, Another Opens” or “Tomorrow is “The First Day of the Rest of Your Life.””

Many catchy, succinct phrases are fun and helpful if we don’t spend too long pondering their truth. Another door doesn’t always open to something of greater value automatically. The second door could lead to a worse outcome. Yes, the next day is always a start, but it begins from a different place as every second passes. Walking blindfolded into traffic will still give you a starting point tomorrow for the rest of your life, but it won’t be anything like you thought it might be before stepping off the curb.

What about the dinosaurs, you say? I’m glad you brought that up.

What if the meteor that hit Earth, which may have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, hadn’t happened? That would have produced another 60 million years of evolutionary time. How would they look now?

Our brains, language, and social patterns have brought us to 8 billion people.

This leads me to a ‘thinking experiment.’

Would the dinosaur learn to use tools to its advantage?

Well, a few examples will circle back to the Blog’s title. A college dropout is unlikely to become a rocket scientist. The opening and closing of doors mould almost all possible endpoints.

Some dinosaurs, over time and on different continents in different environments, grew to the weight of 10 elephants and as long as the longest whale. But only some dinosaurs. The family of sauropods evolved; their lung design, bone structure and metabolic rate helped them do so.

Similar dramatic evolutionary gains occurred in the carnivorous species of dinosaurs.

But isn’t there always a but, just when you thought I was making progress in the thinking experiment?

Dinosaurs didn’t evolve larger brains over millions of years. I think that if we had waited just a little longer, they would still have had small brains. The T-rex, at the apex of the food chain, had a 400-gram brain. The Velociraptor’s brain weighed 15 grams. The human brain weighs between 1000 and 3000 grams.

Some dinosaurs evolved into birds, and they evolved into land and water birds.  But many dinosaurs remained largely as dinosaurs, continuing their genetic preference for increasing size and no-growth brain size.

Mammals, that folks like me and you in particular, grew brains but body size did not show much body growth.  Apes, elephants and dolphins could also be included in this group. Their brain growth is not as dramatic as humans but still showed significant growth.

Yet when monkeys reached North America as recently as 20 million years ago, they didn’t evolve much and eventually went extinct.

To tie all these thoughts together, our evolution was not inevitable. It took variations in our starting points to produce the variety of end points.

Please give this a bit of a think. How much of your future do you think will be inevitable, aside from the inevitable moment of death and paying taxes before that event overtakes us all? Are there advantages you are underutilizing? Are there disadvantages that may be exaggerated in their impact?

Please comment: Send me an email with your bit of a think. I am curious about your thoughts.

Photo by Eugene Zhyvchik on Unsplash

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