Yeah, what George Carlin says! On the 'immigration' issue anyway.
As far as bringing back the steam engine, it hasn't gone away. I have a friend in the power generation field that was telling me that there are some of the power plants that run gas turbines using a heat exchanger to recover energy from the exhaust to drive a steam turbine. The biggest problem was load management. When you need the steam the most (sudden spike in demand) it's not there in meaningful quantities.
