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Comment by raarts | Hacker News Reader

Creating humans so weak that they instantly fall sick as soon as they leave sterilized environments (or are getting mouth-to-mouth when needed).

We need good functioning immune systems. We also need close human contact. We need to shake hands with strangers. If we don't do that we will estrange from each other and conflict will ensue.

We should treat our immune systems like we should treat our children: train them to withstand the outer world, not keep it away.

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Not so. There are plenty of things in your home environment to keep your immune system busy. Most of its activity appears like nothing is attacking you because it’s just so good at what it does most of the time. Without humans to infect, there really isn’t a way for new pathogens to readily emerge naturally that are able to infect humans. Anytime you let a pathogen use your body to reproduce then pass it to someone else you are taking part in its evolution and adaptation to the human immune system which does not really change much unless there is a big human extinction like the Black Plague. Western Native tribes were highly susceptible to European pathogens not because they were isolated but because the pathogens had a lot of time to evolve various nasty traits by freely spreading throughout the European and other populations prior to being introduced to the natives. Viruses don’t just become highly lethal to humans without spending considerable amount of time being spread around by humans or an organism very closely related to humans.

I think we can agree that sterile environments affecting a population's immune system was not a factor in 1918.

There's a big difference between a sterile environment and plonking 100s of people from different places into a pressurised tube for a few hours before releasing them into another city a thousand miles away. The type of behaviour we accepted as "normal" was anything but.

People have always travelled and shared their germs. Some of them probably worse than what we have now. I think it’s perfectly natural for 100s of people to get together and travel. Sailors are a good example of how this relates to the past. Going to Mars will be the future. We cannot isolate as tribes.

Just because it’s always been done or natural doesn’t make it a good idea. Plagues were pretty terrifying events throughout history until we became aware of how they spread. The advantage we have over our animal counterparts is our ability to learn from our mistakes and upgrade our culture to decrease the chance of causing unnatural deaths in our populations. You are right we definitely shouldn’t isolate as tribes. This should be on the individual level when being exposed to anyone you aren’t around daily. This doesn’t constitute a tribe. If someone carelessly takes part in the spread of a pathogen without attempting to prevent it from using their body to get to other human hosts who are perhaps more vulnerable, they are ethically responsible for the death of every individual that is infected and does not recover as a result of that carelessness.

I'm not saying that because we did it in the past, we should continue doing it. Knowledge is power, and we have concrete evidence that herd immunity works. We need germs to work as a species at the moment, so let's find a way forward that doesn't restrict air travel or blame the butterfly for the monsoon, right?

There is a line between exposing yourself to a little bit of something that you're like to catch anyway, and sticking the world into a blender and expecting every organism to come out stronger. Life is always at risk from pests and diseases that evolved in other ecosystems. Always will be, unless we destroy the boundaries between ecosystems and create a single worldwide ecosystem (which would be fucked).

I diagree that we have to find a way forward that doesn't restrict air travel. Worldwide air travel for the masses is a very recent fad. It's a terrible co2 emitter and was bound to trigger an event like this.

Travel in a book?

> We also need close human contact. We need to shake hands with strangers. If we don't do that we will estrange from each other and conflict will ensue.

For me, hand shaking has always been uncomfortable, and let's not speak of places where they greet by kissing. I don't see physical contact outside of your intimate circle as a human need, but as a political move to fake friendliness. I will keep greeting people politely, and after this pandemic I won't feel guilty again for not having physical contact forced upon on me.

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