Volcanoes and Coffee

I was telling Rose, my oldest daughter, about the Toba Event

(Toba was a volcano in Sumatra that erupted about 73,000 BCE, with an explosion far greater than anything seen since. It produced a volcanic winter - ash and gas blocking the sun - that lasted six years. This caused a general cooling that plunged the planet into an ice age)

. I told her about the cycles of warming and cooling the planet has seen just in the last 75,000 years (a blink of global history). Then I concluded that this cycle will continue, and that sooner or later, another volcano, comet, or other dramatic event will once again alter the planet's climatic cycles.

"But life will continue," I reassured her. "Life will once again crawl out of the sludge, blink in the weak sunlight, straighten its spine, find its thumbs, and proclaim to the universe:

I'm gonna put a Starbucks right there.