Reminds me of a quote from A Canticle for Lebowitz:

The horizon came alive with flashes as the monks mounted the ladder. The horizons became a red glow. A distant cloudbank was born where no cloud had been. The monks on the ladder looked away from the flashes. When the flashes were gone, they looked back. The visage of Lucifer mushroomed into hideousness above the cloudbank, rising slowly like some titan climbing to its feet after ages of imprisonment in the Earth...

...The breakers beat monotonously at the shores, casting up driftwood. An abandoned seaplane floated beyond the breakers. After a while the breakers caught the seaplane and threw it on the shore with the driftwood. It tilted and fractured a wing. There were shrimp carousing in the breakers, and the whiting that fed on the shrimp, and the shark that munched the whiting and found them admirable, in the sportive brutality of the sea. A wind came across the ocean, sweeping with it a pall of fine white ash. The ash fell into the sea and into the breakers. The breakers washed dead shrimp ashore with the driftwood. Then they washed up the whiting. The shark swam out to his deepest waters and brooded in the cold clean currents. He was very hungry that season.

There is life deep within the earth that will likely survive no matter what happens to the planet. The sun could fade, we could nuke the surface, have an asteroid completely resurface half the planet, and microbes will survive and eventually recolonize the entire world.

Not that we’d want a mass extinction of so many unique and beautiful things, but it is a comforting thought to realize we can’t really do anything that would render earth entirely devoid of life. And even if everything we know was lost, life would rise again to reclaim the rubble.