By that token, law is also trivia. The thing is, how successful do you think the internet is going to be? It has, within a few decades, permeated almost every a

By that token, law is also trivia. The thing is, how successful do you think the internet is going to be? It has, within a few decades, permeated almost every aspect of our lives, and it seems set to get even bigger. An analogy in human history would be, say, society itself. Before that, people lived in isolated subsistence-level, hunter-gatherer tribes. When bigger societies emerged, a member of such a tribe could have made the argument that knowing the rules of such a society was useless trivia because it wasn't really useful, as opposed to knowing how to hunt and recognize berries that aren't poisonous. These tribes either integrated into larger societies or became extinct. Needless to say, I do not know the future of human civilization or whether the internet will continue to be important or even retain the same structure, but it seems reasonable to suppose that it will, because as more technology is built on top of it or that utilizes it (all our computers and mobile devices, web apps, etc), it becomes more indispensable, subject to the emergence of disruptive substitutes. Forgive this rambling comment, but I have a point, which is this: I think that as more widely-used abstractions are built on top of a basic structure, this structure becomes an increasingly important reality unto itself and the mechanics of it become deep knowledge, at least where us humans are concerned. Also, I would point out that though I agree with you on math, physics and chemistry, to most people, those are useless trivia too.