No one would have believed in the last years of the twenty-first century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences marginally greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of the series of tubes as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable, or more importantly, trivial. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Gizmodo, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of the interwebz, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects cynical and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely blogged their plans against us.