The amazing million-dollar garter snakes.

One can only imagine what state our current civilization would be in if this kind of thought process (and I use the term "thought" loosely) had pervaded our entire history. Look around you at your cities, your highways, your bridges, your entire civilized infrastructure. How much of that could be built if it was started today? Good grief, imagine what environmentalists would have said when someone proposed the Golden Gate Bridge.

Oh, yeah, I'm sure there are lots of people who would be delighted to have had American civilization crippled in its infancy, relegating us to a marginal, eighteenth-century existence clinging to the eastern coastline. Fine. They can go live in a sod hut somewhere. I'll take the freeways and skyscrapers, thanks.