Across the street from me, workers walk the roof beams of a new house under construction.  If I hold my fingers up and sight a worker between them, the worker is about ant-sized from here.

The house wasn’t there a week ago — the walls and roof are going up quicker than seeds in the former farm field took root.

Years have passed since the last time I heard an AgCat swoop in and out, spraying the fields full of soybean, corn or cotton.

Instead, row after row after row of suburban tracts spread east of here.

When, 1000 years from now, while we’re sitting here discussing this blog entry, will we understand the concept of suburban living?

Will we perceive a period of growth of our species when two-dimensional plans for living space were a common norm?

When did it become an uncommon norm?

Tiny bricks-and-sticks castles members of our species once called home.

I stapled sheets of galvanised metal mesh over holes under the eaves of our house to limit attic access by raccoons.

Although I didn’t mind watching the raccoons come and go, my wife couldn’t sleep at night when the baby raccoons bounced and chased each other above the roof over our bed.

Silence fills the space where the raccoons once played.

I’m sure the broad-headed skinks and bats will return to the attic and chimney, much quieter occupants that my wife will not know about — out of sight (and sound), out of mind, as they say.

When did people think grassy spaces were the preferred method of landscaping around one’s domicile that was most acceptable?

Sitting here on a celestial body devoid of ants, spiders, moles, trees, snakes, algae, fungus, ferns and mold, I wish I could explain why my ancestors let their yards grow wild.

You don’t appreciate what you had until it’s gone.

Sure, some of my workmates have found ways to play games once popular on Earth — golf, tennis, futball and such — but the dust they kick up tells the story, doesn’t it?  Nothing living that disturbs which we destroy to accommodate our leisure gamespace.

That’s the thing about living here.  No competitition against other species to keep us busy.  No insect/rodent exterminators, no crop insecticides, no preservatives or other means of fighting back nature’s way of seeking equilibrium, inertial or otherwise.

We’re not completely sterile, of course.

We’re so integrated with each other, though, that we detect the start of pathological infectious disease infestation in one of us so quickly that we can redirect resources, both internal and external, with the tiniest of thoughts, repairing and adding telomeres as long as we want to stay alive.

At 503 years of age, I’m older than most here on this colony but still younger than some lifeforms on Earth, both mobile and stationary.

Am I wiser?  I don’t think so.  Ubiquity of information makes all of us as wise as another.

Well, it’s time I revert back to your chronological space and share my mortal self with you, observing your ignorance and suppressing a smile at how antiquated everything you do seems to me and others 1000 years in the future.

Don’t think of this as time travel.  Think of it as me immersing myself in your historical records, becoming one of you virtually while parallel thought processes of mine live in my time, too, “earning” my place in our mesh-network society.