New Horizons is one giant leap for all machinekind. The most immediate impact of the New Horizons space probe has been to raise anew the simmering question about Pluto. Namely, what is it?

A decade ago, folks at the International Astronomical Union ejected Pluto from the fraternity of nine planets in the solar system after astronomers kept finding similarly sized objects nearby in a band called the Kuiper Belt.

But from the remarkable photos sent back by New Horizons, Pluto sure looks like a planet to us — round, with an 11,000-foot ice mountain and five moons. And if the IAU insists on calling it a "dwarf planet," we would only say: Dwarf planets are planets, too.

But the debate over Pluto's nomenclature, as interesting as it might be, detracts from the larger importance of New Horizons. Its arrival in the far reaches of the solar system is a big deal. You might even call it one giant leap for machinekind.

New Horizons is the latest example of how, in recent years, machines have been running circles around man in the exploration of the cosmos.

The Opportunity rover, for example, has been sending back images from Mars for 11 years, longer than could be contemplated by a manned expedition still decades in the future, if it happens at all. The Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory have seen things well beyond the capability of the human eye. The Wilkinson microwave probe has determined the age of the universe (13.7 billion years, give or take) and found it to be made mostly of a mysterious substance called dark matter.

And now New Horizons has arrived at a place no human could reach anytime soon, if ever. It's enough to make one wonder about humans' place in a world of rapidly advancing technology.

This, however, is not some dystopian tale of machine enslaving humankind. Rather, it is a paean to the great things humans can accomplish by building machines that do what they can't. It is also a story of how the space program both advances technology and showcases our attitudes about it.

During the 1960s, the United States was eager to show that it was more advanced than the Soviet Union. Americans were also infatuated with their newfound mobility, thanks to the omnipresence of automobiles and the arrival of jetliners.

For people just getting their heads around the idea of being able to fly to Paris in eight hours, putting astronauts on the moon was enormously appealing. Not only did it show just how advanced a civilization America had become, in a deep visceral way, it also captured Americans' aspirations to go places.

What energizes people these days is the amazing things they can do while not going places. With a pocket-sized device, they can finish a grant proposal, trade stocks and send a concert video to 500 of their closest friends.

In that sense, probes such as N ew Horizons are the perfect embodiment of these times. They are cool and cutting-edge while capturing how we can transmit data across vast distances — in the case of Pluto, from a mere 3 billion miles.

USA TODAY's Editorial Board