I don’t know, but it’s effect is definitely not niche. It’s how you get GPS.

Would you agree that atomic clock for super precise timekeeping falls int the same cathegory?

If you ever get a fresh whole chicken (for dinner, for example), you can remove the breasts, then carefully remove the ribcage, make a small hole in the trachea, insert a straw and blow into it, you can inflate the sacs. Even if you know they are there, it’s still quite surprising. They are big! Highly recommend, if you’re up to such things.

I think human babies do the same thing. That’s why they can breathe while breastfeeding.

If you select a sufficiently short and localised subset of data, you can show almost anything. Would I be wrong to guess tjat your opinion is heavily influenced by the current state of the US? While I agree that the situation there is complete shit and something needs to happen, I would argue (admittedly without any solid data in hand) that globally, automation is helping loads of people and is going to continue to do so.

Well, that sounds completely reasonable. I’m aware of this difference, but maybe I misunderstood what I read. Or misremembered, it’s been a while.

In general, it obviously is. The standard of living is rising over the last few hundred years. Many people can quite easily get things and amount and types of food that would be unthinkable just several decades ago. Many of which wouldn’t be possible to manufacture at scale, if at all, without progressing automation. Jobs shifting from production (agriculture and manufacturing) toward services are clear indication of this.

Enriching the rich disproportionately more is also happening. But that is somewhat different story with partially different causes.

My quick search shows numbers much closer to yours than mine. I remember mine because I was surprised it was so small. I thought I read it somewhere reasonably believable (but don’t remember where), but maybe it was some estimate not generally accepted. Thanks for correcting me.

I think the current very rough estimate is around ¼ of the universe being observable.

Fun fact: smaller and smaller part of the universe is observable. As the space is expanding, it drives the furtest reaches of observable universe away faster than the light can fly. So the area, from which the light could reach us if it flew for the time since the big bang, is smaller today than it was yesterday. It really drove home for me just how big universe is.

So you don’t think that automating production and freeing people to do what they enjoy while improving their standard of living is a worthy goal? Yes, we are moving in the right direction, but there’s still an astonishing amount of manual labor in terrible conditions happening in poor countries to produce cheap stuff. For things that are automated elsewhere, but it would cost more than the cheap labor there. As I said, it’s sad.

And yet we’re still far from succeeding. It’s sad.

Approximately. It differs a lot and the upper limit goes down with age. It also depends on loudness. I could hear up to around 16 kHz in my early twenties. I doubt many adults would hear 20 kHz, unless it was very, very loud.

This is actually a third one. The second was called 2I/Borisov, I think.

Can you not fly with it? In Europe, you can, the limit is 5 or 6 cm of blade. I regularly fly with mine.

There were also pigeon-guided missiles against ships in development.