How were scientists able to come to the (pretty much universally accepted) conclusion that it was a meteor that killed the dinosaurs when no one was around to witness it?

Question

Is it even remotely possible it was something else that happened around the same time?

In: 0

Answer 1

Science is a method of collecting evidence and trying to stake out a likely sequence of events based on the evidence, no matter where it leads.

As for scientists, they are humans who sometimes do human misstakes that color their findings.

In contrast to religion, a human witness is not a strong evidence to the scientific method, as humans lie, decieve, missconceptualize, remembers wrong and imagine events that might not be true to the fact of what actually happened.

Nature, however, does not lie or imagine. That means that we can create methods to examine nature, for example, measuring radio active decay to determine the age of something. Other geological methods have also been established to figure out greater time spans than radioactive decay could.

Witnesses are actually a very uncertain method of examination when it comes to establishing historical fact, when compared to traces left behind by nature it self.