I was reading a discussion about atheism vs. theism on a usenet newsgroup, and one of the participants said something about "now that you atheists are in control, the world will be ravaged by wars." This made me wonder: is it possible to measure just how much in the way of "warring" is going on at any moment? Can we tell, in some objective or numeric way, whether the world is getting safer or more dangerous? For example, let's do some tallying over the past, say, 1000 years. For each year, count (or estimate) the number of conflicts (of any size, or bigger than some minimum size), the total number of fighting soldiers, the total number of military and civilian casualties (dead and wounded), and the world population. My gut feel is that, as a percentage of the world population, the more soldiers fighting and total casualties, the more "warry" it is. (Along with the year-by-year tallies, significant events and developments [e.g., introduction of gunpowder to the west, creation of the United Nations, etc.] could be included, to see if [or how] they affected things.) Do we have any historians here? I wonder whether this'd be an interesting thesis topic. Aloha, Brad