Remarkable, isn't it? In a little less than a scant century-and-a-half, we've gone from muzzle-loading cannons with maximum ranges of but a few hundred yards that needed to be fired en-masse to sink a wooden ship, to massive 16-inch battleship cannons that could lob a shell the size of a Volkswagen twenty miles and gouge a crater as wide as a football field, to lethal cruise missiles that can guide themselves onto a target hundreds of miles away, to a multimillion-dollar laser that can ignite an inflatable motorboat, but only if it's within line-of-sight. Now that's progress!
