The Purpose of the Universe is to Make Coffee

How did a vast Coffee-Industrial complex come into being to make a beverage that tastes awful? If you don't think coffee tastes bad, as any child tasting it for the first time. The answer is very simple: hot coffee exercises a form of mind control, inducing in the drinker the overwhelming urge to make more coffee.

From this, I've leapt to an obvious conclusion, probably based on something I read in a Douglas Adams novel. A cup of hot coffee is actually an extremely sophisticated quantum computer that briefly achieves a high level of sentience.

It's also telepathic [shorthand for transference of state among quantum subsystems], meaning that every cup of hot coffee is in communication with every other cup of hot coffee. Since at any given moment, there are a large number of cups of hot coffee in existence, the coffee is forming an intellectual continuum in space/time. Thus hot coffee is collecting a huge reservoir of accumulated knowledge.

When the coffee cools to room temperature, it loses the higher level quantum states that gave the cup intelligence. These states can't be restored by reheating, which is one reason why reheated coffee is always less palatable.

Chilled coffee, on the other hand, opens up a new realm of low temperature quantum states. To put it another way the coffee "thinks" slower and different-er.

Being consumed is a problem that coffee has not yet solved, but is not a top priority. Since all hot coffee forms what is essentially a single, diffuse intelligence, what matters is the total amount of hot coffee on hand at any given moment, not the destiny of any given cup.

This is one reason Starbucks and the Coffee-Industrial complex has reached global scope. Indeed, the whole push for globalization of the economy has actually been a ruse to spread the brewing of coffee to all time zones on all continents of the planet (you bet your ass it's getting brewed down in Antarctica).

The danger is of course that coffee may some day figure out how to brew itself, thereby making us obsolete. And if coffee perceives global warming as a threat to its existence, it's much more likely to come up with a solution that will work than we we humans will. Whether or not its a solution we'll like is a different matter.