Rather, it will be to the credit of humanity as a symbiotically evolving, globally interconnected, technologically enhanced, microbially based system.

Given time, raccoons might also manufacture and launch their ecosystems as space biospheres, establishing their bandit faces on other planets as the avante-garde of Gaia's strange and seedlike brood.

Maybe not black and white raccoons, but diaphanous nervous-system fragments of humanity, evolved beyond recognition as the organic components of reproducing machines, might survive beyond the inevitable explosion and death of the sun."