I didn't stay up to catch it live but it was damned amazing.  Here's a video from the Curiosity rover during final descent; some pics taken by the rover after the dust settled are there, too.  Among the most incredible things was the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter catching a photo of it about 60 seconds before touchdown.  Not sure if it was planned for it to be in position or a coincidence, but amazing either way.

I couldn't sleep...it was driving me crazy waiting to hear.

I told my teen aged son tonight how they got it there and what it could do and he said, "I didn't think stuff like that was actually real now.".

Then I told him in three years we have a craft flying by Pluto and he was literally speechless.

Certainly not!  https://forums.wincustomize.com/429063

NASA has an X-box app for live streaming and the lander has it's own Twitter account where it posts "in character".

Amen brother.

I grew up in the 6p0's where we had the constant dystopian vision of the world overcrowded and polluted with no chance to survive unless we all started eating leaves, wearing loin cloths and letting predators and disease kill all of us.

To me, a bigger concern is that we are depleting wildlife and plant habitats at tremendous rates and not doing anything to preserve the gene pool of the species we're pushing out of existence. If we "break the system" we may never be able to reintroduce what's needed to bring it back.

As the world gets more industrially developed, the "reserves" that existed in undeveloped countries start to vanish as they consume them for growth.  If we keep going like we are, eventually we may run out of enough landmass to allow biodiversity to keep working.

My own son didn't realize that we actually sent ships to other planets since the moon landing.  When I told him Pluto was next he didn't know what to say.

This thread actually reminds me of fishing!

I have lived on the East Coast of Australia most of my life and have been a keen fisherman for over 30 years.

There is supposedly a type of fish called a 'kingfish' that lives here and which i will commonly see people catching on TV shows.

The interesting thing here is that in all my years of fishing, not only have i never caught a 'kingfish' but i have never seen anyone else catch one, nor have i ever seen anyone carrying one or unloading one from a boat, or even seen a dead one on the beach or even a head left behind at the fish cleaning tables. Not only that, but i have discovered in conversation with friends, who fish, that this is the same for them too!! As far as i know this fish is about as real as the dinosaurs on Jurassic park! The fish do not exist in my reality or the reality of any people i know, so it is of little or no interest for me to watch people catching Kingfish on TV, i will say "oh there catching Kingfish, change the channel".

The point is that we are all so used to seeing things that are not real on tv, that the line between what is not real and what is not real 'to us' in our own lives starts to become blurred, and so things like the curiosity landing can actually manage to be uninteresting to people.

That too may change. Recently another moon was discovered orbiting Pluto. That brings the total to five......Pluto has five moons dancing around with it in the deep dark. Astronomers are thinking reclassifying Pluto as a non-planet was a bit premature simply because only 'planets' are supposed to have moons. Most likely Pluto will be reclassified as a dwarf planet. Why they even changed it is beyond me. Dum dums!

Pluto already is classified as a dwarf planet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto#Classification. If Pluto was again reclassified as a planet, we'd gain another couple planets as well. The dwarf planet Eris is actually larger than Pluto, and orbits much farther out. There's also a handful of other objects past Neptune that would also probably have to be considered planets if Pluto is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_beyond_Neptune

Also, the ability or lack-there-of of an object to have moons is irrelevant to whether it is a planet or not. Mercury and Venus of course have no moons, but are very clearly planets. There are a number of asteroids in the asteroid belt that have moons of their own http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor-planet_moon

To be fair, they were all discovered in the early 1800s before the concept of an "asteroid" had come about. In the 1850s when a lot of these "planets" were being discovered, astronomers realized that classifying them as such was wrong and they were subsequently known as asteroids.

Let the conspiracy theories begin!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2185737/Internet-conspiracy-theories-begin-mystery-blotch-appears-Mars-rover-photo--disappears-hours-later.html

It is the pictures the 'don't' give us you should worry about!