One of my favorite SF stories is, "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel". One of the best scenes in it is when a teenage boy, a little girl, a Roman legionnaire, and a Neanderthal are put before an intergalactic court older than Man, to justify our continued existence.
The best the boy could come up with is... the Parthenon.

In the years since first reading it, I've replayed this scenario in my head a thousand times, making a list of the examples I would present to the court. This makes the list.

(I even worked up an outline for a story where aliens come to Earth to put us on trial... and the whole thing is a sham; the alien's purpose is to show us how *good* we actually are, so that we'll let ourselves go on to the stars rather than degenerate into primitives.)

Here's another version of TSO doing the Canon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQNirj6lb...