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Unpopular opinion: Viruses have been with us for our whole human history. At some point we just have to go back to coexisting with them.
by mrfusion 6y ago
Unpopular opinion: Viruses have been with us for our whole human history. At some point we just have to go back to coexisting with them.
- dagmx 6y agoThis is nonsensical unless you purposefully ignore the difference between benign and harmful viruses. You can't coexist with something that kills you. Humans could choose to let viruses do their thing. Viruses can't choose to let humans do their thing.
- choward 6y ago> You can't coexist with something that kills you. Citation needed.
- pxue 6y agoFollow up unpopular opinion: At some point we got so obsessed with extending the human existence we forgot how to live with the little time we've got. 60s is the new 40 sounds nice but really it's a sad state.
- majewsky 6y agoEpidemics are a relatively new phenomenon as far as human evolution is concerned. Within a purely human set of hosts, germs don't feel evolutionary pressure to become more deadly. If anything, it's advantageous for a germ to be less deadly. The most successful viruses are the common cold viruses, not SARS or Ebola. Epidemics only really became a thing once we started domesticating animals and therefore being around live animals for prolonged periods of time. This allowed germs originally adapted to these animals the opportunity to jump over to human hosts, for which they may be more dangerous than for the original host animal. For more details on this point, I can recommend this video on why the native Americans were killed by diseases imported by the European conquerors, but the conquerors didn't bring any deadly diseases back to Europe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk