Digging up an old thread I know, but I thought of Neil today when I looked into my telescope at the nearly half-full moon in the sky. I have a 10' Celestron reflector telescope, and I had it on the lens with the highest magnification. I gazed upon the moon and my telescope happened to focus on a crater just to the northwest of Tycho. In the crater was a sharp peak, a very defined and acute mountain compared to the rest. The sun was hitting the moon at a certain angle, and the mountain was half in shadow.
Upon the surface of the crater, which mind you was completely flat save for some small craters, one could see the shadow of the mountain stretch across the basin of the crater. It then struck me that how huge this mountain must be, if the shadow from it stretches hundreds of kilometers across the lunar surface. It has to be double the size of Mt. Everest. I got to thinking how ridiculous the idea that people use, even in metaphor, that mountains could be moved by muscle alone.
Then I got to thinking, someone has moved mountains before. Not physically, but in spirit. Neil Armstrong. Not just himself, mind you, but with the aid of thousands of people who worked behind the Apollo 11 mission: my Grandfather and Grandmother included. These people moved mountains, Neil Armstrong moved mountains. No other event in history, no singular event, has been as defined or as immortalized as what occurred on July 20th, 1969. No other event has changed us as a species. Because of this, it jump-started an era of innovation that still, regardless of what you see on the news, exists today. The human race has advanced more in the last 50 years than it has in the last 5,000 combined.
I adjusted my telescope slightly to aim to the east of the crater, near the equator, directly onto Tranquility base. I felt like I was looking into a time machine, of all the steps that were made to that point in 1969, and how that step will trigger larger steps. Mars, manned mission to other stars, who knows. But that "small step for man" was the greatest giant leap for mankind there ever has been.