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It is not out of nowhere. It's the analogy you selected. It's literally a law of the universe. It's fundamentally just conservation of momentum. It's not some "utterly deranged" statement like your current examples, which are untethered from any mathematical reality of scaling. It's the actual fundamental law of how scaling works for the analogy you selected. In your analogy, they might not have realized where they were on the exponential at the time that they were making great gains; they might not have quite realized how far along they would be able to go before running into this fundamentally exponential scaling curve. But that was the underlying reality of the world.
I mean, how do you think this is supposed to go? "Let's use the analogy of flight, but it's absolutely forbidden to notice that there is a scaling law there, because that would be 'out of nowhere'"?
That there is a hard scaling limit is true but it's not remotely relevant to my point since the difference between a bird and a nuclear rocket is so vast as to make any comparison but the most galaxy-brained 'it's all specks of dust from 50,000,000 light years' ridiculous. This should be immediately apparent!
That there is a scaling limit is secondary to where the limit actually is. There is no reason to think we are anywhere near the scaling limit. In rocketry we are limited by our level of investment and our unwillingness to use advanced propulsion, not by physics.
Your whole framing is ridiculous:
In context, underwhelming because it isn't galactic scale? And by the way, it clearly is galactic scale in a fairly reasonable timespan. Galactic scale in space, why not give it a couple hundred thousand years? A million years is peanuts in astronomical time, in the movements of galaxies or the evolution of life. You're taking an analogy I selected, not understanding it and then producing mixed contexts while complaining about my single, relevant, assumed context of 'things that matter on Earth to real human beings' as opposed to the 'insanity of exponentials and the universe' which doesn't matter to anyone.
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