Humanity has had lots of very unsafe sex for the last one million years and survived just fine. The risks are more to the individual than the species as a whole.
Humanity also didn't have widespread intercontinental travel for most of the past 1 million years.
We all live in a single Petri dish now. A few thousand years ago humanity existed in many many isolated communities and was much more resilient to disease. Regular pandemics every ~10 years are very much a side effect of technology.
I don't think that's true. Look at the death count by various years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics . Better health care seems to more than offset the extra risk from air travel.
Not only air travel. Sea travel. A thousand years ago there was an entire backup continent (the new world). And plenty of isolated communities were decimated when explorers came and brought alien diseases. Air travel just accelerated the process so that pandemics can spread within days rather than years and the effects can be seen in real time.
When life expectancy was 30 years, it was because many children didn't live past the first year; still, 70 year olds were common in hunter-gatherer societies.
Common doesn’t mean that most people made it. In a world where you can die for a cut, a hunter doesn’t last to be 70 very easily. This is one of those counter-myths that I’ve been seeing too often lately.
The comment about dying early made sense: Just because we lived with unprotected sex for the last million years (and we changed genetically due to some viruses that we got along the way) it doesn’t mean that we’re now still willing to bear the consequences.
I’m willing to bet that nowadays we have far more sexual partners than we’ve had since we started “society”
Seriously? The only person I know my age that’s getting laid is...married to his wife. Where is this moral panic coming from? If anything the new moral panic is young people aren’t having sex at all.
I don’t think they’re a huge amount of people, at least currently. It looks like about 30% of Americans between 25 and 50 have never been married. That means at least 70% of that group has been married, more will marry in their lifetimes, and likely a large amount of people fornicate out of wedlock.
That indicates that the vast majority of people has at least one sexual partner, with many having a lot more thanks to sexual liberation.
For the record, I’m not saying that this is a bad thing at all. I was just alluding to the fact that we can’t compare life and expectations of safety to what it was even 100 years ago, let alone over “millions of years”
Irrelevant - none of the STDs that have survived to this day and that also existed in prehistoric times would have been a major cause of death, except perhaps as complications in child birth.
