Phil Plait, of Bad Astronomy fame, comments on Neil Armstrong's life and passing:

[LongTomH]

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/08/25/neil-armstrong-1930-2012/

There is so much that can be said about this man, from his incredible career to his notorious shying away from the spotlight. He had history thrust upon him, and performed in a way that will be an inspiration to generations of explorers.

I’ve said many times that we can divide all of history into two parts: before humans landed on the Moon, and after. It was not just an important moment, it was the moment, a defining, crystallizing slice of time that confirmed that we humans had become a space faring race. One world could not and would not contain us, and the sky itself was no longer the limit.

We have had our missteps since that one small step, and we can argue about the directions we are or should be taking. But given what we’ve done, and what we are capable of, I have the spark of hope that the future will look back at July 1969 and recognize it for what it was: the dawn of a new era. The end of homo sapiens terrestrialis and the birth of homo sapiens cosmos.

Neil Armstrong was the human who literally stood at that dividing line.

And I wonder… will there someday be a holiday in his honor? In my mind’s eye I can see people lining the streets, watching parades, talking about that day, smiling and laughing… and all the while, through a quartz window in the dome, the crescent Earth will be hanging in the black sky above them.

[a geek named Bob]

1. I like it!

[Ron Obvious]

2. Sure...

And yet, let's be honest here. Aren't we just a little bit disappointed with how little progress we've made since 1969? I was a kid on that day and I was absolutely sure that by the time I was really old (say 30 or so), I'd have visited the moon myself, and we would most certainly have thriving communities on Mars as well. No doubt we'd have outposts on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn..

I once heard someone coin the word 'postalgia' to describe a kind of nostalgia for the kind of naive optimism we used to have for the future as described in the SF of the 50's and 60's, like the movie 2001 or the Jetsons. It seemed to change in the 70's and 80's with Soylent Green, Logan's Run, Blade Runner, The Running Man, and all those movies that are sadly closer to our current reality.

[pokerfan]

3. This xkcd from last year sums it up

tooltip: The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.