This is all just subterfuge. If someone goes after why WTC7 fell down they will easily see this business of airplane hijackers is a smokescreen.

"The operator uses the machine to fire the laser beam at a photovoltaic collector located on an unmanned autonomous vehicle (UAV), small plane or helicopter. The current range of the system is about a kilometer." I suspect if those tankers only had to go a kilometer, not as many of the soldiers would have died.

Taking your example, that's 236 square feet per person. I have been living with no public utilities or water well for 6 years. After figuring how I was going to deal with my water and sewer works on paper I discovered most problems go away with the water. For example, when civilized I took 15 gal showers. I now take 1/2 gal showers and get just as clean. I don't have a water heater ... I have a saucepan on the stove,. I don't have a flush toilet. I have a post hole digger. About once a month I dig a 6" diameter hole 4' deep. And I deposit my waste in it. I have a metal plate I cover it with. In six years I've appropriated an estimated 16 square feet to this purpose and have redug all parts of it at least twice being careful to allow enough time for nature to do its work. No odor. No flies. No water. No hassle. My proposal for Gates is to buy them all posthole diggers ... less than $20 each. Back to your example, that leaves 220 square feet per person to do whatever else they need to do.

"Right now the Internet has these choke points because theres no reason other than FUD not to have it that way." I don't think this is correct. IP doesn't make "hops" fast enough to transit more than about 20 nodes in 1/8 second (the latency required for interactive voice). In a mesh network there's no way end to end transit could be accomplished in 20 hops. We took a giant step backwards when we abandoned ATM which can makes 10's of thousands of hops in a second.

Why were they still using it in 1973?

I just hope someone is working on gravity and gets it figured out (and the anti-gravity byproduct) before I die.