Eventually there is going to come a day where a supervirus hits and takes out the entire population.
Complete nonsense. If this were the case such a "supervirus" would have already wiped out the entire population some time in the past 10,000 years of known human civilization. This doesn't even happen in the world of lower animals and plants, about the only time a pathogen can wipe out an entire population of an organism is if the population is all clones that haven't had time to diverge, such as with the Big Mike banana (the yellow kind not the purpley-black kind). Even then, examples of Big Mike still exist, it's just not commercially viable.
In reality, there will always be a substantial set of people that are naturally immune. There will also always be a set of people that aren't immune, but aren't fatally affected. Immune systems are far from perfect, but they are more than effective enough to keep pathogens from wiping the slate clean, and they've been doing it for hundreds of millions of years.
I'm not an antivaxer, I believe vaccines are a great tool for lessening the impact of pathogens, but ultimately they are not in any way critical to the survival of the species. If they were, we wouldn't be here.
This particular vax I am not getting, because it's a novel class of vax, has been rushed through testing, and there are too many shady actors involved. It's simply not worth risking relative to the risk of wuflu itself.
You make good points, but I disagree. Here's why. The key difference between now and the entire history of mankind is one thing. Transportation. In the last 100 years we have become more interconnected than ever before. Look at how fast this virus was able to propagate around the entire world in only a few months. And you're right some people will be able to survive a supervirus, but it won't matter.
Today we live in a world of efficiency. We specialize in the work that we do. I don't know how to make food. I write software. I'm not a farmer or a butcher. But I don't have to be. And therein lies the weakness of our civilization. There is a critical point where if enough people die the supply chains will stop and the supply of food will stop. What would happen if all the grocery stores stopped carrying food for 6 months? Utter panic. This would happen in the case of a supervirus. And those who did survive the virus would starve to death. Only the few who isolate themselves and live off the land away from people will survive. It will truly be like an apocalypse sans zombies. And even if those people do survive, knowledge will not. Our knowledge of math, science, computation, will all die when those specialists die. It will be an effective reset of all our progress and would take centuries to recover from it.
You should expand your horizons. I write software. I build hardware. I cook. I grow plants. I wrench on machines. I react chemicals. I do this all because the crafting system of reality is a billion times more interesting than any video game's, and it's fun.
Your view is narrow because your experience is narrow, by your own doing. You underestimate the resilience of humanity (and life in general) because you yourself are not resilient.
Sure, civilization collapses a bit and humanity takes a haircut from time to time, it's inevitable. It's also survivable, and with the amount of informational redundancy we have now due to copying technologies like printing presses and computers, we're better equipped to preserve knowledge through a collapse than ever before. Books aren't going to vaporize, computers aren't going to stop working. We might have a hard time finding surplus energy for a while to power the technological world to the extent we do now in the case of a collapse, but the information isn't going away. We preserved a lot of information through collapse in times when it was extremely difficult to do so, when there might just be one copy of a book in a library in Alexandria. Now it's extremely easy because there's thousands to millions of copies of everything important, globally distributed.
You underestimate the resilience of humanity (and life in general) because you yourself are not resilient.
You're probably right. And I do cook, but I don't grow my own food. However, you can't deny that the industrial revolution has made humanity more vulnerable because we have been able to rely on machines to do our work for us and therefore less people have had to know how to make food as a means of survival.
And yes information would survive, but it hardware does degrade and we would need a way to keep the important data preserved. You could write a book on this topic alone. You know that as well as I.
Complete nonsense. If this were the case such a "supervirus" would have already wiped out the entire population some time in the past 10,000 years of known human civilization. This doesn't even happen in the world of lower animals and plants, about the only time a pathogen can wipe out an entire population of an organism is if the population is all clones that haven't had time to diverge, such as with the Big Mike banana (the yellow kind not the purpley-black kind). Even then, examples of Big Mike still exist, it's just not commercially viable.
In reality, there will always be a substantial set of people that are naturally immune. There will also always be a set of people that aren't immune, but aren't fatally affected. Immune systems are far from perfect, but they are more than effective enough to keep pathogens from wiping the slate clean, and they've been doing it for hundreds of millions of years.
I'm not an antivaxer, I believe vaccines are a great tool for lessening the impact of pathogens, but ultimately they are not in any way critical to the survival of the species. If they were, we wouldn't be here.
This particular vax I am not getting, because it's a novel class of vax, has been rushed through testing, and there are too many shady actors involved. It's simply not worth risking relative to the risk of wuflu itself.
You make good points, but I disagree. Here's why. The key difference between now and the entire history of mankind is one thing. Transportation. In the last 100 years we have become more interconnected than ever before. Look at how fast this virus was able to propagate around the entire world in only a few months. And you're right some people will be able to survive a supervirus, but it won't matter.
Today we live in a world of efficiency. We specialize in the work that we do. I don't know how to make food. I write software. I'm not a farmer or a butcher. But I don't have to be. And therein lies the weakness of our civilization. There is a critical point where if enough people die the supply chains will stop and the supply of food will stop. What would happen if all the grocery stores stopped carrying food for 6 months? Utter panic. This would happen in the case of a supervirus. And those who did survive the virus would starve to death. Only the few who isolate themselves and live off the land away from people will survive. It will truly be like an apocalypse sans zombies. And even if those people do survive, knowledge will not. Our knowledge of math, science, computation, will all die when those specialists die. It will be an effective reset of all our progress and would take centuries to recover from it.
You should expand your horizons. I write software. I build hardware. I cook. I grow plants. I wrench on machines. I react chemicals. I do this all because the crafting system of reality is a billion times more interesting than any video game's, and it's fun.
Your view is narrow because your experience is narrow, by your own doing. You underestimate the resilience of humanity (and life in general) because you yourself are not resilient.
Sure, civilization collapses a bit and humanity takes a haircut from time to time, it's inevitable. It's also survivable, and with the amount of informational redundancy we have now due to copying technologies like printing presses and computers, we're better equipped to preserve knowledge through a collapse than ever before. Books aren't going to vaporize, computers aren't going to stop working. We might have a hard time finding surplus energy for a while to power the technological world to the extent we do now in the case of a collapse, but the information isn't going away. We preserved a lot of information through collapse in times when it was extremely difficult to do so, when there might just be one copy of a book in a library in Alexandria. Now it's extremely easy because there's thousands to millions of copies of everything important, globally distributed.
You're probably right. And I do cook, but I don't grow my own food. However, you can't deny that the industrial revolution has made humanity more vulnerable because we have been able to rely on machines to do our work for us and therefore less people have had to know how to make food as a means of survival.
And yes information would survive, but it hardware does degrade and we would need a way to keep the important data preserved. You could write a book on this topic alone. You know that as well as I.