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You made the argument that what I described - long-term pollution - was "bound to happen" with anything that doesn't break down naturally. PVC, lead and U-238 are all inorganic and don't break down naturally. Lead and U-238 can both be used to make bullets. Lead is toxic, but in practice, millions of discharged rounds didn't cause the kinds of serious mass illnesses attributable to far smaller numbers of U-238 rounds.



Not from scratch, no. But people were working to weaponize smallpox, anthrax and other pathogens since before the World Wars. It's entirely possible HIV was weaponized just like other naturally occurring pathogens were, not in 1959, but at some point thereafter.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

We took over the Americas so easily because we gave everyone here smallpox.

If destruction exists, we must destroy everything.
Shuruppak Yuratuhl
Slaad Shrpk Breizh

If I spread a buttload of PVC all over a war zone, it would also be pollution, and due to the properties of the material it would be long-term. The fact that one type of pollutant is volatile or hazardous when another isn't makes little difference. That the substance is hazardous was not in question, I was simply explaining that the nature of the material was to be expected based on it's chemical and physical properties.

Lead has nowhere near the toxicity of DU, making comparison similar to comparing the pH of citric acid (lead) to hydroflouric acid (DU). "Attributable" is not the same as "attributed," and there is doubt that many of the unexplained health issues that some are trying to link to DU are related to the substance.

Your Pal,
Jubber

AKA "The Gun"
AKA "ROFeraL"

World Renowned Mexican Forklift Artiste

It's not a false analogy - the point is that there are a large number of possible hypotheses, and each can be assigned some level of probability. The rational approach is to accept the hypothesis which is best supported by the weight of evidence, pending discovery of new evidence. In this case, the best supported hypothesis is the mainstream scientific one. This doesn't mean that alternative hypotheses are necessarily wrong, just less probable. Conversely, the fact that alternative hypotheses have non-zero probabilities doesn't mean that they are true.

Laelia Komi Anomalocaris

Wrong. To accept any hypothesis is fundamentally premature.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Perhaps the words I used weren't entirely clear. Accepting a hypothesis doesn't mean you are declaring it to be the truth, just acknowledging that it's the best explanation for the evidence. In this case the mainstream scientific hypothesis is the best explanation of the evidence.

Laelia Komi Anomalocaris

iirc, a "fact" is the lowest on the scale of truth in science and I believe "theory" is the highest and "hypothesis" is somewhere in the middle

[✔] [item]Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker[/item] (Three)
[✔] [item]Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros[/item] (Two)
[✔] [item]32837[/item] & [item]32838[/item]
[✔] [item]Thori'dal, the Stars' Fury[/item]
[✔] [item]46017[/item]
[✔] [item]49623[/item] (Two)
[✔] [item]71086[/item]

Not at all. In formal usage they all refer to different things (although in informal contexts hypothesis and theory are often used interchangeably). A "fact" is something that can be observed, a "theory" is a more or less comprehensive model for how some natural system works, and a "hypothesis" is a testable prediction for a specific phenomenon. A scientific fact would be something like "The sun is ~1.5 x 10^8 km from Earth". Examples of theories would be relativity or natural selection, which offer explanations for large classes of observations. An example of a hypothesis would be "Chemical X causes cancer", which could then could be tested in an experiment - "If chemical X causes cancer, mice injected with chemical X will develop more cancers than uninjected mice" (there are a lot of assumptions associated with this type of statement that need to be accounted for, but this is the basic form).

Laelia Komi Anomalocaris

Ah okay, yeah it was years ago that I heard something along those lines and it never made sense to me since in all science classes we used the definitions that you explained.

[✔] [item]Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker[/item] (Three)
[✔] [item]Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros[/item] (Two)
[✔] [item]32837[/item] & [item]32838[/item]
[✔] [item]Thori'dal, the Stars' Fury[/item]
[✔] [item]46017[/item]
[✔] [item]49623[/item] (Two)
[✔] [item]71086[/item]