The air space above an empty inner city field hints at a potential condo tower. The air and a strange term called “air rights” are becoming values in a tourist-real-estate culture.  However the emergence of the metaverse has created more than additional space for sale.  There is an expanded market for air.  The gathering of shorebirds knows nothing of contracts or air rights.

Scattered along the tide line birds search the wave castings for meal-making morsels.  They will take to the air with wings and fold into formations.  They will soar without regard to rights and titles and tourists.  Yet their life will be altered because their air has been cluttered, their sea crudded and their breeding grounds cemented over.

There is an infinite serenity in the rolling skies.  There is a promise of forever.  Yet the transition from selling real estate in the universe to the metaverse hints in a capital way that we have exploited this planet and have moved on to the “air” or space in the metaverse.  Air is ethereal.  Our history of frontier exploitation may be prologue to what is next.