Mama, I'm gonna go to the bathroom and pick my nose. Can you come too?

As I was walking downstairs to the garage to empty trash for the Monday morning Waste Management pick up (cargo included regular trash, recyclables and used diapers), I realized what a useless being I am.  Waste Management picks up and processes our trash, GM/Toyota make our cars (mechanics repair them), our clothes are manufactured in other countries and transported to us by different companies, when they tear or a button or two come off, we dispose of them rather than repair them, electricity is generated and delivered to our residence, water, gas, piping, the house that was built for us were not by us.....  Just how much would we be able to accomplish if dropped on a different planet where we had to fend for ourselves, like in the movie Predators with Adrien Brody?  Yet, a few thousand years ago, we were completely self sufficient.  I would be a laughing stock of earth's inhabitants back then, but I can sure devise a mean spreadsheet on a laptop I have little knowledge of the mechanics.  Now we have refregirators so we can stock food derived from cattle we would have no clue how to raise, but we sure like to graze like them.

Sometimes I wonder if I were to travel back in time, whether on my own free will or kicking and screaming, how much would I accelerate the development of useful (and useless, e.g. text messaging) technology?  I can describe how I used to drive a kick a$$ car, and fly thousands of miles in a matter of hours 30K+ feet in the air, but would I be able to hasten the invention of automobiles, aircrafts, antibiotics, the steam engine, drip irrigation, electric power generation, AC/DC (the band), prevent the rise of communism and Stalin, fascism and Hitler, Pol Pot, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, AIDS, 400K+ deaths a year in the U.S. from cancer and complications caused by smoking, and 9/11?

In all of human history, we're the most spoiled bunch, and we have little to show apart from our college degrees that load us with useless information on how to push meaningless numbers around in a fictitious economy manufacturing nothing, but not how to diagnose and repair common breakdowns in our house (read Shop Class as Soul Craft).  I have a fire alarm 25 feet high on the ceiling that was chirping for weeks 'cause I couldn't find a feasible way of changing its battery until we called a handyman to get it fixed!  I bet our neighbors were enjoying the pleasant sound.  Pluck the moron who put a fire alarm on a cathedral ceiling.  I haven't been billed for the handy service yet, but I bet it's no more than $75 for that, and repairing our kitchen faucet from low water pressure.

Today, we are so dependent on others to provide us with the basic necessities of life that even my 2.5 year old daughter asked my wife to join her in the bathroom while she picked her nose.  These are her words:  "Mama, I'm gonna go to the bathroom and pick my nose.  Can you come too?"