Life from coffee

Through dint of long study, exhaustive hours of research and countless gallons of coffee, I have finally discovered the secret of life on earth.

All life on earth came from a leftover Styrofoam cup half full of coffee left here eons ago by a passing group of aliens.

Think about it. Ever seen a coffee cup a month or so old? Ever seen the coffee in it? Of course not. What you see is a new civilization that has sprung up on the surface of the coffee. Happens all the time around my office. I’m still finding coffee cups the late owner forgot about. Some of these coffee cups have passed into serious evolutionary changes. 

A 100 years from now, the newspaper editor will still be finding my coffee cups, with whatever has developed inside.

Right now several Ph.D. dissertations in biology, physics and other sciences can be found on, under, beside, behind and sometimes inside the desks at the newspaper office here. Which is not to say this is unique to newspapers. I’d say the majority of offices in the whole world have some coffee cups hanging around proving Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.

Anyway, that all life here sprang from a leftover cup of alien coffee makes incredibly good sense to me. Here’s how it likely happened:

Two aliens, ZZort and Glopty are passing through our newly formed Solar System on their way to a well-earned vacation in the Pleaides. They see the earth, all rolling and gooey with molten lava, volcanoes, steaming seas, etc., and decide to stop and take some pictures so they can bore their friends with a slide show when they get back home.

ZZort has Glopty stand in front of a particularly picturesque volcano for a photo, seeing as how the light will reflect just so off her shining new scales. He puts his coffee cup down so he can better handle the camera. He snaps the shot and the two get back in their spacecraft and continue down the hyperspace highway to the Pleaides. ZZort completely forgets about his coffee, until it’s too late.

“Dear,” he says as they hang a left at the Big Dipper, “Did you see what I did with my coffee? I can’t seem to find it now.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. We’re coming up on another service station in a few hundred parsecs. Just get another cup there,” Glopty says in her reassuring way.

Meanwhile, back on the earth, volcanoes spew poisonous gases, hot ash and liquid rock into the air for millions of years. The atmosphere churns away. The small coffee cup continues to sit as a new life form begins to take shape on the dark surface of the coffee. Over the next few million years, the life spreads across the cup, into the valleys and up the mountain sides and into the oceans where it continues to evolve, multiply and turn into new and exciting life forms like politicians. At least I have long suspected polticians evolved from something found in a cup of month-old coffee.

Meanwhile, the life forms which came from the cup of coffee continue their relentless search for more coffee.

You disagree. Then you explain why there are coffee shops on every street corner in any city of more than 10,000 people, shops which charge a very small country’s gross national product for a cup of coffee you can brew at home for about one-billionth the price.

As a theory, it’s sound. The only thing I’ve got to do now is find that billion-year old Styrofoam coffee cup. Shouldn’t be too hard to do as the things never break down. I suspect it’s located at Area 52, the super secret trash dump next to Area 51.

Any giant university, charitable organization or anyone with a lot of money willing to fund this research project for the next few decades should contact me immediately.