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On July 20th 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder of the Lunar Module and walked on the Moon.
His footprints are still there.
The moon has no rain to wash them away, no plantlife to cover them over and the solar wind that brushes the moon is feeble. Barring a meteor strike, those footprints are likely to be there for a very, very long time.
In a cave in Romania archaeologists have found human footprints dating back 36500 years. The people who made them are so long gone that even the dust of their bones has dissolved away, but we can still see where they walked.
On the way to work I walk past a little patch of pavement repaired with cement. Human nature being what it is, and kids always guaranteed to be right little sods, there are footprints in it..
I don't know how long that cement has been there. For all I know, those kids are now parents themselves.
I do know that people will strolling past those prints until the next time the council digs up the pavement.
So about another decade then.
The other day for some bizarre reason I decided to pop back and revisit a forum I used to frequent until 2011. In a coincidence that even I don't believe, some of the regulars were talking about people who weren't around any more. And my name came up.
Which got me to thinking.
At one point or another I've belonged to a number of online forums. Some, I posted a few times then never went back. Others, I chimed in regularly and often for several years before gradually drifting away.
Even so, my name is still up on their members' lists. There's threads I posted in that remain active to this day.
You'd have to dig deep into the archives, but my contributions are there for anybody to find and read.
When it comes right down to it, there's little bits of me scattered all across the internet. Little echoes of the person I was and what I was thinking right at that very moment.
Footprints preserved in binary code.
Sooner or later the time will come when I blog one last time and then walk away. This will become yet another one of the millions of webpages that never update but lie abandoned and forgotten, like ghost towns in the desert. I'll have left behind another period of my life and another set of footprints.
There's no way of knowing how long any of these things are going to remain, but I have this faint hope that in a century or so, there will be a cultural historian studying the early 21st century and he or she will stumble across this page.
So, if you are currently hunched over an old, dusty hard-drive poring through the files, trying to make sense of it all, I'd just like to say this.
Hello. My real name is Dale
Don't let the Internet fool you. The 21st century wasn't totally full of dickheads.
But most of all, I want to say
Big D was here.
And long after we are both forgotten, long after the great cities have crumbled into ruins, Neil Armstrong's footprints will still be up there on the moon.
That's all folks.
Hi Big D :]
ReplyDeleteI was here too!
The internet is funny like that. I saw a post by an internet friend who had died. It made me think about digital footprints and I posted this on Twitter: The internet: where words you write while alive, hang around like ghosts when you're gone. --comforting, reminding... or scaring people.
And How cool would it be to see those moon prints in person?!
" The internet: where words you write while alive, hang around like ghosts when you're gone. --comforting, reminding... or scaring people."
DeleteI like that a lot. And it's so true. I know for a fact that there's blogs out there where the authors are no longer alive - but what they wrote and drew is there to act as their memorial.
Seeing the moon in person? The 21st century is only just starting. I live in hope.
Great post, Dale. It's still mind-boggling for me to think about the internet and cyber-space, probably because I grew up so long before it was around. Even weirder to think that there's a voice, past or present, that's attached to each of those binary footprints.
ReplyDeleteThank you. I'm glad you liked it.
DeleteIt's amazing how big cyberspace got in such a short amount of time, isn't it?
Beautifully written, Dale. A nostalgic piece to be read sometime in the future. Quite the paradox!
ReplyDeleteHmm. That's an interesting way of putting it but you're right.
DeleteThen again, everything we write is intended to be there for someone to see in the future, even if it's ourselves in ten years time.
I'm glad you liked it.
Well written post Dale, defiantly something to think about.
ReplyDeleteDefiantly? I thought it was fairly laid back. ;~}
DeleteThe "Big D Was Here" at the end probably counts as defiant :)
DeleteBut I'm glad you liked it Scott and my fellow Dale. Thank you for commenting.
Really excellent, thoughtful post D.
ReplyDeleteApropos of not very much (but tenuously connected):
I don't know if you're a Terry Pratchett fan, but in his proto-Discworld™ novel, Strata, about terraforming planets, one of the gags involves the lengths the planet builders go to to confound future archeologists.
They bury the "skeleton" of a T-rex which appears to have been holding a placard at the moment of its death which reads "Stop Nuclear Testing Now"
Genius.
Thank you. I don't do "Thoughtful" very often so I'm rather pleased that people lied it.
DeleteI know the book you mean. I used to have a copy but it vanished at some point.
There's somebody did an album recently called "The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here" - a tribute to the Creationist claim that dinosaur skeletons are just there to mess with people's heads.
Great post. It really made me think of the trails I've left behind in cyberspace. It's nice to know there will be plenty bits of me still around long after I'm gone.
ReplyDeleteThe comment that we're not all dickheads was great. I wonder, though, if they'll know what a dickhead is a century or so from now.
I can pretty much guarantee they'll have their own around as comparison. Given the way technology advances, they'll be able to fart at you over the Net.
DeleteGlad you liked the post. Thank you.
Hi Big D,
ReplyDeleteI have left my imprint in cyberspace too - and although I don't consider myself to be a dickhead, there is evidence that on occasion I have been.
Great post.
:0)
Cheers
PM
I'm pretty certain I've had my dickhead moments too. It's easy to be a cockwaffle on the net if you're not careful.
DeleteGlad you liked the post PM old chap.
A big thank you to everybody who's stopped by to add comments. I don't do "Serious" very often so I'm really happy that so many of you seem to like it. Cheers guys.
ReplyDeleteHello Dale, excellent post! Amazing to think how long Neil Armstrong’s footprints will remain on the moon, perhaps until some civilization sets up a base there. Equally amazing to think how long our blogs and comments on sites we frequent on the Internet will remain in cyberspace, perhaps eons of time. It’s mind boggling when you think about how everything we write today is leaving a cyber footprint for the future. Food for thought indeed. Really enjoyed your post, Big D!
ReplyDeleteThank you very much. Apparently those footprints could be up there for millions of years so by that point, they might very well be the last trace that humanity ever existed.
Delete