“Calling it the end of the world was a conceit. The world kept ticking on just fine, it was humanity that took the hit. Seven months from top of the food chain to endangered species. Mother Nature breathed a sigh of relief. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, ‘fish and houseguests smell after three days.’ By extension, after three hundred thousand years, we’d really stunk up the place. It took decades for the payback to come, but that’s what it does so well... the Earth abides.”
