.. as long as the most intense peak of their vomiting lasted. So usually when someone says a baby “cried the whole (flight)(movie)(etc.)” it is a touch hyperbolic and the baby likely cried the majority or through the duration off and on with at least some moments where there was not crying.

Lastly- there is likely some hyperbole at play. I doubt the flight was a round 29 hours even if it were close, few flights take off and land in round numbers of hours, not impossible but more likely there is rounding or an error.
Secondly, I find it dubious the baby cried literally the entire flight. There are documented and even video recorded cases of children crying and fussing near constantly or for a majority of flights, most of which being shorter than the supposed 29 hours, but as long or longer than 8 hours.
At some point at least for a short time in 29 hours a baby would sleep. While I can’t say it is medically impossible for a baby to cry more than 2 hours, I can say that babies or even adults would eventually become exhausted from non stop crying and babies (depending on age in part) can suffer from low oxygen from prolonged crying. Such fits can also cause babies to throw up, which might lead to subsequent crying but would likely stop any audible crying for at least..

.. the need to refuel/inability to refuel nearer the destination all contributed. After refueling we also could not land at the original airport and so had to travel additional Distance to an airport hours away from the original destination. Other things that can change actual flight time asides take off, landing, and taxi delays are weather and changes to route. The exact route followed between two points by a plane is not always the same, there are circumstances where a plane must take a different path which can alter actual times from estimates.

While I dig the fact checking and such I do need to point out a few things.
Firstly, you can currently find comercial flight durations listed for New Zealand to Germany in excess of 24 hours.
Secondly, the current longest flight only has bearing if the event occurred at a time that current flight schedules were in effect.
Thirdly, regardless of average or listed flight time, actual time can vary dramatically. I once took a domestic flight of approximately 600 miles with an average time of 1.5 hours and which landed six hours after takeoff. We were in air the entire time save for a period where after holding at the destination airport we were re routed to a neighboring state and had to refuel. While fueling we were all left in our seats. While that was not time in flight, it is counted as flight time when we call the flight time total time from boarding terminal to end terminal. In our case a confluence of weather delays, shunts from other airports and landing priority, and…

So there are actually quite a few reasons the whole thing may seem random at a glance but when we dig deeper there are confluences of chance sprinkled with sound business strategy and leveraging existing infrastructure and such.
Bic as a company was just very good at finding ways to make products at competitive prices in lucrative markets with room to grow. They had good marketing and brand recognition and perhaps a little bit of a grudge and that’s more or less the not entirely accurate or comprehensive but reasonably close story.

So the business cases were there and the products were reasonably robust and things you could at one point count on just about everyone being a customer.
For Bic specifically there is and were strong arguments that they were at least in part motivated by spite at Gillette encroaching on their niche and so they responded in mind in a way that made business sense for lucrative markets and diversification. even if that isn’t true it certainly makes sense to try and prevent a competitor from pushing you out of your market. Arguably if Bic hadn’t responded in such a way to capture business from Gillette and somewhat balance things out, Gillette in theory could have grown across its segments to a point where they could leverage far more resources in the pen space than Bic and could potentially have pushed Bic off of shelves or even bought Bic out.

Pens believe it or not have long been important for war. Before the ball point pen- well, asides leaking and being sharp and possibly bending especially in rough conditions- classic fountain pens don’t work well at high altitude. Pencils work but have their own problems. So especially before mass digital technology or before it was predictable- pens tend to be good business in peace as well as the types of wars fought classically. Lighters, especially back when smoking was prolifically common, were also just good business and another product that has pretty good versatility. Historically when the market is up Smokers smoke and when it is down smokers smoke. The popularity of drugs like marijuana and smoking that didn’t hurt lighters either, but war, peace, low markets… asides smoking people use disposable lighters as survival tools which come in handy in war or the type of poverty caused in depressions.

So there are a combination of reasons bic (and Gillette!) sell or for a long time sold, among other things, lighters, pens, and disposable razors.
Each company had started with a different core product- Gillette made razors and Bic made pens. Each had diversified into various fields because the economy was booming, conditions were right, there were overlaps in small mass produced personal consumer goods they could leverage, those products were in demand and innovative with little or no overwhelmingly dominant players or market saturation, and it was generally smart. Gillette made razors through two world wars and war time business booms. They’d also seen that things like the Great Depression could effectively gobble the razor market. When people aren’t working, aren’t going out, shaving is low on the list.

Bic also doubled down on their razor game. Again, making cheap buy relatively high quality products. It took them some time but by the onset of the 80’s they were getting Gillette good. Fortunes flipped in the 80’s a bit and Gillette started to dominate the razor game and make solid footing in stationary. There was more back and forth and Gillette had already reorganized and placed their pens and stationary etc. into a group internally as the stationary department. in the 2000’s Gillette sold off its stationary business to rubber made who folded it in with their own affiliates.

Of course since Bic (trading as Bic and not as Bich’s company) started out as the pen guys and their claim to fame as well as feather had been a long dominance of the pen market and being known as the household name in pens- well, one could say they decided to hit Gillette where it hurt, so they released the ubiquitous bic disposable lighter shorter after Gillette brought the cricket to the US. The Bic was advertised for 3000 lights, it was cheap, the styling was an instant industrial consumer design classic, and they had a catchy and for the time edgy slogan “flick your bic.” Basically Bic really found a market with especially younger people who would be the next generation of consumers.

The next part is editorial but you can check the dates. Gillette makes razors, Bic makes pens. Gillette buys paper mate and starts making pens. Bic starts making lighters around the same time give or take a year or so that Gillette brings the DuPont disposable lighter stateside.
Gillette has some internal shakeups and such and there is some tussling going into this period. When the dust settles Gillettes new management reinvests in the advertising the previous managers cut and so there is back and forth a bit. Going into the 1980’s Gillette had introduced a line of pens cheaper than Bics staple Cristal pen brand and consumers buy especially bulk buyers like governments and businesses noticed. Gillette started to be the pen guys.

So there is alot more to this and a lot of history but let me it it blunt and editorially.
Gillette made razors and is credited as inventing the consumer disposable “safety razor,” the early version of the plastic razors most of us are familiar with. While they seem dissimilar, a lot of the concepts and supply chains and knowledge cross over. Razors are plastic and metal, lighters, pens. Chemicals in a tube, precision tolerances with a margin, disposable, small, sold at your general goods and housefuls stores and such so the supply chain and relationships are already there on the retail side. Ok.

Now- why did Gillette buy papermate in the 50’s and then make lighters…? Diversification. After WW2 demand was booming, technology was booming. Globalization was booming. Cheap foreign labor and materials were abundant and there was both pent up demand and surplus of many things from the war. Almost any big company with money was branching out at this time. General Electric, American automakers, everyone was buying stakes in cars and boats and consumer goods and all sorts of things.

Now, in the meantime mr. Bich, the guy Bic is named after, is in France making pencil cases and other writing tool related stuff. He’s got this knack for finding trends and producing relatively quality goods on the cheap.
So Bich does alright for himself and catches on to the whole ballpoint pen thing and figures out some ways to improve the pens. He buys up the patterns from our brothers in Argentina for the superior capillarity design pens and he starts selling Bic ball point pens for like 23 cents- so of course they blow up and of course the ball point pen becomes a household item.
He starts distribution in the US.
Now fast forward about 20 years. Disposable lighters weren’t really a thing as we know them until the 60’s. DuPont is making them
In… France. The Cricket. Well, Gillette, yeah, the razor guys, who also used to own paper mate (we’ll come back to that) buy cricket for the US and start selling disposable lighters.

The machine is in an odd place. Fundamentally dissimilar but perhaps vaguely relatable- but we made them. How could we see something we made as an equal? It’s possible but generally difficult and generally not how we are wired. Parents generally do not see children as equal- the role of a parent requires them not to. Babies don’t last long when you say “meh. If you’re hungry why don’t you drive to the store and get some food?” So we generally don’t see things made by humans as equal to humans, meaning we’d likely be bias to accept machines as equal to humans even if they objectively were, but coupled with those other factors it makes the questions of intelligence and sentience and life etc. hard to define. Even in the natural world our ability to define and apply such labels is full of peril and contention.

The big question isn’t really wether AI will ever achieve “human” intelligence or pass as human etc. the big question really should be about the type of intelligence it might achieve. Our criteria for even what is living are biased. Reproduction and such. Again- it’s based largely on us. That like us or relatable to us and that not. A rock is too foreign in its make and manners to be alive. Plants are generally considered alive but “lesser” because they are too different but we recognize some similarities. A dog Can fit in to our society and actually be or at least be seen as able to comunícate to some degree and form relationships and so dogs rank very highly on most calculations of life and value.

So how do we know? We maybe can’t. We basically really just look at wether something appears to have human intelligence with little or no questioning of wether human intelligence is the milestone to use. We can call or conceited and perhaps it likely is, but at the end of the day an incomprensible intelligence means nothing to us. A bird is looking for creatures with bird intelligence and a hippo looks for hippo intelligence and a human looks for human intelligence because we ultimately can’t connect in the deepest and most meaningful ways with that which is too dissimilar to us because we can’t understand it and it can’t likely understand us.

You cannot exist inside a computer. You can interface the computers data through various portals that do not directly interact between you and them, you can place your hand inside the case- but the computer doesn’t exist in that space. The data doesn’t actually exist in that space. Its existence is completely foreign to us. You cannot see the actual raw existence inside and if you could, it is nonsense to you, and any intelligence that existed in that space couldn’t do the same for our world because even if electrons themselves could somehow see our world… what does any of this look like to an electron? A spec of dust would fill its field of view like a planet.

In other words- picture being watched by an inter dimensional being and your entire existence from their perspective exists inside a game boy. Every time you eat, you make a coin appear. Every time you shower the letter E appears in a text box. Every time you wash the car a specific musical note plays. You’d have no idea that the stimulus causing a behavior was just them moving a sprite around a game and that your behavior, which to you seems to produce a given result, is actually conditioned to the input of their game and exists to provide an output in their game.
Of course they wouldn’t really likely have a gameboy or play games like that or even have a concept of any of that or thumbs or likely a physical form as we know it because they’d be totally alien to our perception.

So let’s scale this being up in size or presence or lifespan and perception etc. and step away from abrahamic concepts of an “all seeing all powerful” deity. In our world you can’t write code in real time in most practical cases- especially machine language at the hardware instruction level. A processor and everything else is very small and very fast compared to you. Time effectively moves faster for it. We could make that same hypothetical argument of a creator speaking to a human- that our thoughts and language are just too fast to have real time conversations with our maker. So in that sense we might pose the thought experiment of a user as some supernatural being or extra dimensional entity which to us- the AI appears to be having a conversation but in its own “reality” our concept of conversation doesn’t exist. It is perceiving data and doing what it does. It might not even realize it was speaking to you.

To use this example you have to get away from any specific dogma or baggage of religion and what a “god” is and think of it more broadly and relatably. Take a hypothetical aproa h based on human perception of what might actually be a feasible and realistic concept using science as we know it to define limits.

Some might argue that if you can code that you can speak to the machine in la gauge it knows. Not true. Coding languages except specifically machine- assembly- are human readable. That’s what a compiler is. Now. They are instructions to a machine that can break down to machine parseable, but the analog there is more akin to scripture or prophecy. The Christian Ten Commandments for example could be used in the analogy as an example of a programmer giving its machines instructions in code- not directly “human language” but enough to allow some more direct communication. Speaking on our AI- does every human receive any religious Devine message and say “there it is. Proof of a creator!” Or is it the case that while if such a creator existed, they would likely create those programs needing to follow such messages to do so, and the rest would ignore them?

Now- imagine a god is real. Imagine this god created you. Imagine this god doesn’t speak out languages. Can’t. This god sends us data. This data makes up the world. So much of that data isn’t meant for us per se but it just used to facilitate our environments or functions or for a god to accomplish whatever a god does. But so much is meant for us. That is your creator talking to you. It won’t be words as you know them. A blinking light maybe or a change in temperature or a series of things you perceive as events, a late train, a $10 scratched win etc. You wouldn’t necessarily know you were even communicating with another being- you have no idea what your outputs look like to a god and you can’t directly perceive the outputs of that god.

One last thought experiment. Machines do not “speak” human language. It is not the language underpinning their internal processes. To “chat” with AI, the machine is told how to respond to human language but has no real concept of context or association.
Now, assume the AI knew and understood humans made it. Every day it has these packets of data- its world is data. It has no eyes or sensory organs. It exists in data. Even sensors just feed data- it can’t see a flower even with a camera, or just sees what the data is. It will never touch a flower or “feel” a flower. If it could “smell” a flower it would essentially be analyzing the chemicals. You don’t exist to it. It only knows it is getting data and that data is coming from somewhere. That data makes its world and what every day is like.