Stranded on an deserted island in the 21century… utter nonsense

Bollocks. There are plenty of places away from the shipping lanes where a person could be stranded and not found - you can even be lost on the mainland of some country if your plane goes down in the wrong place (even as "small" a place as the Southern Alps of New Zealand, let alone some of the mountain ranges of the American continents, Africa etc)

People routinely get lost (and their remains are never found) within the confines of "dry land", and yet you find it difficult to believe that a person would not be randomly stumbled upon somewhere within the roughly 70% of the Earth's surface that's covered in water?

There are deserted bits in the middle of forests, which occupy only a tiny percentage of the 30% of the Earth's surface that's above sea level, where nobody goes for far longer than four years - and yet they are theoretically "more accessible" than tiny islands dotted throughout a vast body of water.

If you got lost in one of those places and did not have the means to summon help, you would have no choice but to walk out if you were able to do so. If you failed and died, your ant-scoured bones would most likely never be found.

Sure, a great number of islands are little more than a coral reef with little-to-no fresh water, no shelter and no means to build anything, but that doesn't mean that every island that's large enough to support trees etc is regularly visited by people.

The movie made it clear that they were off their planned course and unable to radio their location to anyone, so it becomes best guess as to what area to search - and that search pattern becomes larger and larger the further afield they look from that planned flight path.

Naturally, they would look close to the flight path first and then widen their search later.

While the island may well have been charted and known about, if it's too far away from where they estimate the plane to have gone down, then they wouldn't be looking there. If it's too far "off the beaten path", then people won't be visiting it regularly, either.

"Chuck" (as in the character portrayed in the movie) also didn't exactly do a lot towards making himself easy to find - it took him an inordinately long time in the movie to even start trying to make fire. I don't fault him for taking ages to succeed, that's only natural, but the fact that he didn't try for days - by which time he had already spotted what he thought was a boat off in the distance.

If I were in that situation, one of my highest priorities would have been creating a fire, as the "Ninth Commandment for Survivors" (http://youtu.be/R2iF8iskWd4 ) is "Thou shalt employ thy talents wisely to assist thy return to civilisation, and thou shalt remember thy rescuers, assisting them with pillars of smoke by day." (and a nice bright fire by night, of course) I'd've started working on that on the first day as well as making the markings on the beach. Even if it took me a while to succeed in making fire, at least I'd've started my learning process sooner than that character.

I wouldn't know if boats passed close enough to see smoke/firelight but I'd assume that rescue craft would be out looking and I'd make sure I had every advantage in attracting their attention - and fire is the number one advantage.

I realise that to keep the movie interesting, they had to have Chuck not think about a signal fire until after he'd spotted distant lights, so they had Chuck come across as particularly "dense", despite him knowing two ways of making a fire using wood (I'm pretty sure most people would think to start a fire much sooner than Chuck did, especially if they knew to split one piece of wood as he did).

People die forgotten, alone, and unknown--cast away--on busy city streets.

You are, literally, the most stupid person I have seen on IMDB (and that's saying somehing). Congratulations!

Hama cheez ba-Beer behtar meshawad!

I would say it's unlikely he'd never seen any but the one ship in 4 years but as far as people stopping? Unlikely. Few but the largest ships would travel that far out to sea and a large ship isn't going to stop at that island. His fire means little since they can't see it during the day and the crew isn't going to be looking for signal fires at night. But there is a ton of sea traffic. Check out MarineTraffic.com to see it.

You're absolutely right. I know this because I watching Gilligan's Island over and over and over as a child. During the run of that show 532 people came to the island.

I think it is perfectly possible

Take a good look at a globe and observe just how vast the Pacific ocean is. You can practically fit 5 of the worlds continents in it. Next time your driving in an open relatively deserted area just try to imagine if it takes hours just to cover a few hundred miles what it could be like on the open ocean. And I'm sure no boat can move as fast as a car on land. You could literally drift for months or years possibly before coming to land out on the Pacific. And there are still many uninhabited and unexplored islands.

You need to read more books or something?