A Question of Duration

Apparently senseless parallel lines within an oval of compressed silicate dust, almost like the fossil of an impossibly bloated protozoan. But no, we know better: it is the print a booted foot left on the pocked surface of the moon.

Only 40 years have passed and already we wonder, is this footprint still up there? Has it changed much?

We often read how in the absence of an atmosphere, and without neither weather nor tectonic activity, man made marks on the moon should last eons. Yet, apart from micrometeorites, there are all kind of atomic and subatomic particles colliding against the moon all the time. How long will it take those processes to erase even that tiny mark?

Who will know in ten thousand years the name of the man wearing the boot that made the print?

If it endures a million years, will anyone know the shape of the foot that filled the boot, or what species it belonged to?

Will anybody ever go back up there to see these prints again, or is this picture all we'll ever have? Are they ever to be anything else than the human equivalent of a dog pissing against a tree-trunk? A mere "we were here" sign?

Will they be engulfed by the sun when it goes nova?

Will they survive us, the last sign of our ever having existed, and then at the moment of truth be wiped out by the rocket exhaust of the next species that lands on the moon?

Will they be covered and preserved by a molecule-thick diamond film, on an inhabited moon seeded with sweeping seas of grasses and incredibly tall and limber forests?

Do the men who made them long for those few hours on another world, almost 40 years ago?