Leaving Footprints

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.