Likely the most improbable event in human history

Improbable is simply: What you don’t expect. When Neil Armstrong stood on the moon, on August 20, 1969, he disintegrated eons of expectation. Throughout almost all of human history, almost no one, anywhere, ever, expected that anyone would actually, in fact, really travel to the moon. The video below shows the arrival at and on the moon— and also shows how people on earth were anticipating and reacting to it.

Neil Armstrong died yesterday, July 25, 2012. Perhaps more—and more quickly—than anyone, ever, he changed people’s notion of what is improbable.

(HT BoingBoing, which also has lots of related links)

[The first version of this post had a stupid typo: it said the big event happened in August, rather then the correct July. Typos here in our blog are not, alas, entirely unexpected.]