I really wanted to argue with this, but you’re right. Shipping companies would have gone truck-only by now to attack brown countries harder with climate change if brown neighborhoods in the US had any say over the use of train tracks through their areas. Yet another thing that’s not about efficiency or cost, while corporations pretend to be all about money.

We also haven’t tried every possible configuration of atoms to see if anything creates a portal to an infinite energy dimension or a perpetual motion machine or something we can use to make our own stars

Sure, in the prime timeline. But in the pocket universe alternate timeline where time travelers went and executed the perpetrators, I’d say the instructors’ concerns were addressed