Just because something looks weird to us does not mean it's bad. I can read the last sentence at about 70% speed, and I suspect you can too; that means within the 20-year time frame (facetiously) proposed, we could both easily adapt to this. And that's with bad choices intentionally cherry-picked by Twain to ridicule the idea. If the reductio ad absurditem is not really all that absurdum, that's a point in favor of the idea.