[jboydyhacker]

First of all, the most dangerous word in the world is "safe"- there is no such thing. It's an illusion. You are not safe, you will get sick and die one day. We all will.

Also, people have been having "unsafe" sex for over 40,000 years. There's been gay unsafe sex and straight unsafe sex going on all that time.

I'm not sure how we all made it.

[asveikau]

> I'm not sure how we all made it.

I am not a scientist or any kind of expert. But I thought I read somewhere that there are some ape species for whom SIV is endemic and harmless. Others get sick and die.

So maybe it just takes time for a species to adapt and it's very deadly right now because humans haven't been exposed for very long.

[bawolff]

A lot of deadly diseases become deadly by crossing the species barrier. Long term its a better survival strategy to not kill your host.

[inglor_cz]

"We" are subject to survivorship bias. Plenty of people did not make it and their bloodlines are long extinct.

The difference between Stone Age and today is that our civilization managed to conquer most really serious risks that used to shorten the lives of people under, say, 70. Famines, unsafe water, most bacterial diseases are well under control. So, of course, the roster of threats now changed, some of them being civilizational (road accidents), some of them being relatively small holdovers from the ancient days, such as STDs, plus the very aging that makes our mortality curves shoot up in the old age.

But yes, realistically, people are going to bareback one another all the time. Which means that vaccines and cures for whatever bug is transmitted like that are necessary.