...............So what happened in ~60 or so years that we need MORE calories? It's common knowledge that the American lifestyle is far more sedentary than it used to be. Wouldn't that mean we need FEWER calories?
Anyway, you picked a number for EVERYONE as a MINIMUM TO SURVIVE. And that number is fucking huge. As you later acknowledged, it's different from person to person (of course your initial post threw that out the window), but, like I pointed out, it varies WIDELY from person to person, and katt named various factors that contribute to that variation.