The Tower of Babel

A few things about the Tower of Babel don't make much sense to me.  The flood had already occurred.  God was already grieved that he had made man on the earth, and had already hit the reset button on planet earth, destroying all but Noah's family.  Yet, before we get to the halfway point to the first book of the Bible, the feeble humans are already ruining His plans again.

And how, might you ask?  Well it looks as living together peacefully and speaking a single language are part of the problem.  They cooperated to build a city with a big tower to "make a name for themselves" and avoid being scattered over the face of the whole earth.  The Omnipresent lord "came down" to see what they were doing, and was alarmed to discover the fruits of their labor, saying:

 “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

First of all, who is God talking to?  I'm not sure who overheard his words here, nor am I sure who the "us" is that's going to come down and confuse the language of mankind.  Also, it doesn't seem very accurate for God to say that if he doesn't, then nothing that men plans will be impossible for him.  After all, even God doesn't seem to be as powerful as an army in possession of iron chariots. Is he saying that if enough of us team up and cooperate, we'll be as potent as God?  And what mankind would have been immensely powerful as a united team.  These are the descendants of Noah, right?  I mean God just killed everyone on the planet, deciding that only Noah and his family were good enough to live, and almost immediately humanity isn't good enough to be trusted with power?  If only these people were properly inspired, what could they have accomplished by working together?  Clean water and a working sewage system, modern medicine, etc?  Why is God's best option to impede us rather than leverage the, apparently, peaceful cooperation of all mankind to build churches and hospitals and all manner of thing that would demonstrate the power of God?

What bothers me even more is where we are today.  Language and distance are hardly a barrier to mankind anymore.  We can fly into space, and have built many tall buildings which surely dwarf the Tower of Babel.  We're supposed to believe that God is all powerful and all knowing, which would imply that at the time he destroyed the tower of Babel and confused our languages, he already knew about the internet and life in 2011?  Surely much less is impossible for us today than for mankind at the time of the Tower.  If God chose that time to disrupt mankind, shouldn't He have done something more permanent, preventing us from coming to the position we're in today?  Or perhaps He should have waited until today before shaking things up?

I'll borrow from the author(s) of godisimaginary.com and ask this question.  Does the story of the Tower of Babel sound like something from an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-loving being, or does it sound like something written by primitive men who had no way of knowing that in the future, mankind's accomplishments would dwarf everything about their current level of technology?