Neil Armstrong died before we could defeat death

He was not responsible. He participated.

You may give him too little credit; he seems to have been key to the successful landing:

When Armstrong noticed they were heading towards a landing area which he believed was unsafe, he took over manual control of the LM, and attempted to find an area which seemed safer, taking longer than expected, and longer than most simulations had taken.[67] For this reason, there was concern from mission control that the LM was running low on fuel.[68] Upon landing, Aldrin and Armstrong believed they had about 40 seconds worth of fuel left, including the 20 seconds worth of fuel which had to be saved in the event of an abort.[69]

Wikipedia Such unexpected last-minute split-second decision-making is precisely the contribution a pilot could make.

Honoring Neil Armstrong isn't anywhere near the top of the list of reasons to avoid an existential disaster. Hence it's incorrect to say that we would be doing that to honor him.

One of my strongest motivations is a feeling of personal loyalty to my heroes, though I probably wouldn't count Armstrong among them ( but I think he's a cool guy ). Surely I can at least try to live up to the example set by men like Turing, Tesla, and Boltzmann, who sacrificed so much to advance human understanding so far.

He was not responsible. He participated.

One person that may have actually played a non-replaceable role was Hal Laning; according to that article he wrote some particularly tricky code that turned out to be critical for the mission.

We'll fill the stars and conquer death. The spark of intelligence and sentience will not extinguish.

Doesn't follow, existential disaster seems likely.

I don't think that's a prediction of any sensible theory of evolution. It seems more like existential paranoia.

It's melodramatic and vapid.

I feel like I just read a propaganda pamphlet, or maybe a transhumanist soap opera exerpt.

It doesn't have any content. It's just a news bulletin (which we would have all seen on TV anyway) with some emotions pinned on.

EDIT: Things rarely stay downvoted for long though. They tend to reach a minimum pretty quickly and then climb back up into the positive.

I strongly dislike this kind of distortion of facts when used for emphasis, even unrelated distant facts. In the context of this community, approving of such behavior seems disrespectful to Armstrong's memory. (See also this post on Overcoming Bias.)

Denotationally crazy political (namely, transhumanist) rhetoric in the title and body. No substantive on-topic content.

~150,000 other people died today, too. Okay, Armstrong was hugely more famous than any of them, probably the most famous person to die this year, but what did he do for rationality, or AI, or other LessWrong interests?(which I figure do include space travel, admittedly. Presumably he wasn't signed up for cryogenic preservation) the post doesn't say.

Yes, death is bad, and Armstrong is/was famous, possibly uniquely famous, but I don't think eulogies of famous people are on-topic.

I have mixed feelings about this post. I upvoted it because I don't think it deserves to be that low, but will retract the upvote should it get positive.

Fact is, its point seems to be more about evoking emotions than about communicating information/insights somehow related to rationality that the intended audience might not already know, so I'm not sure it belongs on Less Wrong.

OTOH, he was the person whose death saddened me most since after the time Dennis Ritchie died, so... (OK, this also doesn't belong here.)

We'll fill the stars and conquer death. The spark of intelligence and sentience will not extinguish.

No we won't, barring new physics. Even if our civilization avoids catastrophe and invents great improvements in therapies for aging, or brain emulation, that won't let us change the 2nd law of thermodynamics, or prevent the distant galaxies from accelerating out of our reach.

But we can claim every star that now burns. Even if in the vast, long, unimaginably long future of this universe, complexity itself must someday die, we should at least do what we can in the meantime. Perhaps we can't beat physics, but we do have some headroom still!

I found this thread to be "vapid and melodramatic" at first, but I now recognize that humanity did indeed lose something highly valuable with the death of Neil Armstrong, outside and beyond the tragedy that is inherent to the death of any mind.

A spark of intelligence and sentience, a very keen observer, but also, literally the first member of our species to transcend to another world, even if it were for a very brief time. Within a decade or two, human kind will likely no longer have visitors to other worlds among us. Were I a journalist, I would write: "A small death for a man, a giant leap backwards for mankind."

Armstrong, and his fellow Apollo astronauts are to us like the astronauts in Carl Sagan's novel Contact. Ambassadors from the Blue Dot to the vast dead Cosmos. Humanity no longer has it's eyes facing outwards to the other pebbles, to the other stars that burn with unspent opportunity. With their deaths we lose the steady gaze of those who look up, since they have been there, whereas we have not. We lose their voices, and their dreams of someday returning, of someday going beyond 1969.

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

May his footprints someday be lost to the footprints of many.

Someday going beyond 1969 is a crazy ambitious idea today, but seemingly wasn't so crazy before the late seventies/mid-eighties. I'm too young to tell, but it seems this ambition went from bold to crazy somethime around end of the cold war, perhaps as the salient threat of thermonuclear doom faded.