It would. And there are people who interpret geological evidence such as fossils and rock layers supporting a global flood.

You should note, however, that these are interpretations, and whether FOR or AGAINST they are not science. There's no control group you can run an experiment at the scales involved. We don't have a spare earth we can terraform and observe for a million years to confirm/disprove competing hypotheses on what actually happened.

Actually, none can. You can't experiment on the past. You could fail to replicate a historical event - but that mainly says that *you* failed with your existing technology and chosen solution - it doesn't prove that the past did not happen.

Can you build a scientific experiment to prove George Washington was president? That Julius Caeser existed? That the US fought the Battle of Midway?

You can find artifacts and documents that support those historical facts, but that's not scientific evidence. You can perform scientific experiments on the artifacts/documents to estimate their age, to evaluate their credibility as historical evidence, but that is not using science to test historical claims.

You use historical evidence, not scientific evidence, to test historical claims. Some scientific evidence can serve as historical evidence, but science is an inappropriate tool to determine what happened in the past.

Isn't the futures market just a set of predictions on future supply/demand? So it's not completely unrelated, but perhaps prone to large errors. (since predicting the future is a risky business)

Could you give an example? When you talk about "actual facts" and "what actually occurred", you sound like you're talking about past events.

Are historical claims a domain of science?

The default answer is "I don't know", not "I believe not". Saying we must believe there is no god by default is begging the question.

However, we exist and observe ourselves and value reason and truth - which is evidence in favor of the existence of $DIETY. A further evaluation of various human religions could further narrow down the likely true options.

Understanding what a low probability event is does not mean a lack of understanding.

Wrong analogy. Can cell phones assemble themselves through random events, undirected by outside forces?

When you see a cell-phone, you don't think, "Neat accident!" You expect that some other human being designed and built it.

When it comes to a human being, we're order of magnitude more complex than the cell-phone, with correspondingly more capabilities. Yet somehow we're supposed to believe that the human being is a lucky accident, even as we acknowledge the cellphone to be an intelligently designed system.

I've already addressed the finite matter point - one trillion, one googol - those are both finite numbers; but are large enough to boggle human imagination.

It's plausible that there's some point where earth's resources are the bottleneck for a human standard of living, but you have not demonstrated that we are anywhere close to that point.

It's self-evidently true. You're posting on Slashdot, which was built by people, through a computer, which was built by people, over the Internet, which was built by people, using electricity generated by a power plant, which was built by people.

Notice a pattern there? People create. People design. People build. People figure out how to collect raw materials and finish it into the wide variety of products that make modern life prosperous and comfortable.

If you can't figure out that people are immensely valuable - go out into the wilderness and live off your own efforts. Civilization exists because it has people who build it up and maintain it. Take away the people, you don't get to enjoy civilization anymore.

Sure. Now what evidence do you have for that extrapolation as human population continues to increase?

Like I said, humans are resources who can create resources. We are the most valuable resource of all. Comparing population growth to human standard of living in general for the past 100 years demonstrates continued growth.

Don't be ridiculous. I'm saying that belief and faith is a normal thing, and is necessary for humans to practice science.

So there's only a problem if you love science AND hate belief, because that requires suspending Reason. And how do you practice Science without Reason?

It's really sad how many people who supposedly are for science do not get these important details right.

Apparently you don't even know what you just said.

So if it's substantial, surely is must be easy to cite and show it, right? Yet, your first reaction is to attack someone as illiterate ... because he asked you to show the evidence you said existed.

That's not how someone with a substantial amount of evidence behaves.

And that's before I even point out you contradicted your earlier point:

Every increase includes the increase going from 1 to 2 to 10 to 1,000.

By the way, learn to read the name of the person you're replying to before saying, "your argument". People might think you can't read.

There is no way you can believe a claim to be factual without using belief and faith.

There is always a chain of trust - a belief that your senses are accurately showing you reality; that scientific observations were documented properly; or that scientific models built off of those observations reflect reality; or even a belief that there is an objective reality at all!

Wrong. Count the population today vs. 100 years ago.

Now measure the standard of living. Do you seriously want to argue that it was better 100 years ago?

You don't understand that humans are resources - the most valuable one of all. Humans CREATE resources. More humans is more resources.

Don't believe it? Consider what happens if everyone else in the world drops dead right now. Are you better off, with all of the world's resources to yourself?

Are you going to pick up your own trash, cook your own food, build your own car, refine your own oil, create your own art?

Resources may be finite, but that in of itself doesn't mean much. A trillion seconds is a finite number - and it's still an order of magnitude longer than human history.

Let's recap: there was the Sino-Japanese War/WWII (1930s-1940s), the Chinese Civil War (1940s-1950s), communist mismanagement of the economy (1950s-1960s) causing famines, Cultural Revolution (1960s-1970s)...

40 years of war and famine and millions of deaths, and you find that the most important factor in the change of life expectancy is that they "changed their diet"?

I think you have the cause and effect confused. Meat is expensive, as you say - and the reason that people could afford meat in their diet is because China entered a relative era of peace several years earlier, and the government reforms allowed more people to shift from survival to development. It's not the food, it's the politics. Communism is bad for life.

At no point have you actually offered any evidence that this is the case. You are using your imagination to extrapolate "food insecurity" into hunger and then extrapolating hunger to starvation, and then guessing at a potential death rate of "thousands" from that extrapolated "starvation".

I'm sure this thing called a Cultural Revolution at that exact same time had absolutely nothing to do with it. Or a communist government that mistakenly eradicated beneficial sparrows as a pest a decade prior (Google Four Pest Campaign).

Imagine that - poorly thought out solutions hurting the very people it was supposed to be helping.

Under the traditional model, how are those readers reading other books? Library? Purchase?

If it's the library - the reader isn't paying for the other book, but probably not the author's book either. These readers don't matter.

If it's purchased ... well, that's $5~10 that's not spent on the author's own books.

Even without KU, there's less "potential earnings" when recommending other authors. So KU does not make the book market more or less zero-sum.

I have not. You are imagining what I would say about other situations, and using your imagination as evidence against me. Unfortunately, it looks like your imagination is not very good at reading my mind.

I am pointing out that "starving to death" without any deaths is not "starving to death". It is just plain "starving". (Note: Estimated deaths are guesses)

But even claiming "Americans are starving" is wrong, because it takes much more than feeling insecure about food to actually be starving.

If "more intelligent" means twisting words to lie about reality - I'm afraid I don't see why I should care how intelligent you think your group is. If they don't value honesty, they're useless to me and to society. Society is built on trust - not lies.