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Category Archives: Transhuman News

If we want to colonize Mars, viruses may be a key to our survival – TweakTown

Posted: September 16, 2021 at 6:03 am

Most people are sick of hearing about viruses after the events of 2020 and the current events of 2021. But, viruses may play a pivotal role in humans colonizing new planets.

NASA and other private companies are striving towards making the human race a two-planet species, with the end goal being to colonize Mars. That goal is not easily achieved as Mars is a baron wasteland that has an extremely harsh atmosphere, making it very difficult for humans to grow food, store water, and produce breathable oxygen.

Another factor that NASA and other private companies may not have considered is viruses' role in the web of life. According to Professor Paul Davies from Arizona State University's Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, "Viruses actually form part of the web of life. I would expect that if you've got microbial life on another planet, you're bound to have - if it's going to be sustainable and sustained - the full complexity and robustness that will go with being able to exchange genetic information."

Davies and other scientists suggest that viruses are a big component of human evolution and have played a massive role in how we have evolved into the humans we are today. When humans overcome the colonization problems Mars poses, we could see the species divided into two - Earth humans and Mars humans. The latter wouldn't be exposed to any Earth viruses, which could cause a split in humans' evolutionary timeline.

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Before we colonize Mars we need to find a way to have sex in space – The Next Web

Posted: at 6:03 am

Houston, we have a problem! Love and sex need to happen in space if we hope to travel long distances and become an interplanetary species, but space organizations are not ready.

National agencies and private space companies such as NASA and SpaceX aim to colonize Mars and send humans into space for long-term missions, but they have yet to address the intimate and sexual needs of astronauts or future space inhabitants.

This situation is untenable and needs to change if we hope to settle new worlds and continue our expansion in the cosmos well need to learn how to safely reproduce and build pleasurable intimate lives in space. To succeed, however, we also need space organizations to adopt a new perspective on space exploration: one that considers humans as whole beings with needs and desires.

As researchers exploring the psychology of human sexuality and studying the psychosocial aspects of human factors in space, we propose that it is high time for space programs to embrace a new discipline: space sexology, the comprehensive scientific study of extraterrestrial intimacy and sexuality.

Love and sex are central to human life. Despite this, national and private space organizations are moving forward with long-term missions to the International Space Station (ISS), the moon, and Mars without any concrete research and plan to address human eroticism in space. Its one thing to land rovers on another planet or launch billionaires into orbit its another to send humans to live in space for extended periods of time.

In practice, rocket science may take us to outer space, but it will be human relations that determine if we survive and thrive as a spacefaring civilization. In that regard, we argue that limiting intimacy in space could jeopardize the mental and sexual health of astronauts, along with crew performance and mission success. On the other hand, enabling space eroticism could help humans adapt to space-life and enhance the well-being of future space inhabitants.

After all, space remains a hostile environment, and life aboard spacecrafts, stations, or settlements poses significant challenges for human intimacy. These include radiation exposure, gravitational changes, social isolation, and the stress of living in remote, confined habitats. In the near future, life in space may also limit access to intimate partners, restrict privacy and augment tensions between crew members in hazardous conditions where co-operation is essential.

To date, however, space programs have almost completely omitted the subject of sex in space. The few studies that relate to this topic mostly focus on the impacts of radiation and micro- or hyper-gravity on animal reproduction (rodents, amphibians, and insects).

But human sexuality is about more than just reproduction. It includes complex psychological, emotional, and relational dynamics. Love and sex are also pursued for fun and pleasure. As such, space exploration requires the courage to address the intimate needs of humans honestly and holistically.

Abstinence is not a viable option. On the contrary, facilitating masturbation or partnered sex could actually help astronauts relax, sleep and alleviate pain. It could also help them build and maintain romantic or sexual relationships and adapt to space-life.

Importantly, addressing the sexological issues of human life in space could also help combat sexism, discrimination, and sexual violence or harassment, which are unfortunately still pervasive in science and the military two pillars of space programs.

Due to taboos and conservative sexual views, some organizations may choose to ignore the realities of space intimacy and sexuality. They may also think that this is a non-issue or that there are more pressing matters to attend to. But this attitude lacks foresight, since producing quality science takes time and resources, and sexual health including pleasure is increasingly recognized as a human right.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson answers a fan question about sex in space.

More and more, this means that space agencies and private companies may be held accountable for the sexual and reproductive well-being of those that they take into space.

Thus, space organizations who submit to their conservative funders will likely pay the price of their inaction in a very public and media-fueled way when disaster strikes. The hammer may fall particularly hard on the organizations that have not even tried addressing human eroticism in space, or when the world learns that they knowingly failed to conduct the proper research and take the necessary precautions that scientists have been requesting for more than 30 years.

To move forward, space organizations must stop avoiding sexual topics and fully recognize the importance of love, sex, and intimate relationships in human life.

Accordingly, we encourage them to develop space sexology as a scientific field and research program: one that not only aims to study sex in space, but also design systems, habitats and training programs that allow intimacy to take place beyond our home planet, Earth.

We further propose that, given its expertise and the sociopolitical climate of Canada, the Canadian Space Agency is ideally positioned to become a world leader in space sexology. We have what it takes to pave the way for an ethical and pleasurable space journey, as we continue to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Article by Simon Dub, PhD candidate, Psychology of Human Sexuality, Erobotics & Space Sexology, Concordia University; Dave Anctil, Chercheur affili lObservatoire international sur les impacts socitaux de lintelligence artificielle et du numrique (OBVIA), Universit Laval; Judith Lapierre, Professor, Faculty of Nursing Science, Universit Laval; Lisa Giaccari, Research assistant, Concordia Vision Laboratory, Concordia University, and Maria Santaguida, PhD Candidate in Psychology, Concordia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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MarsRise Aims to Colonize Mars by Becoming the Next MoonShot of 2021 – PRNewswire

Posted: at 6:03 am

DUBAI, UAE, Sept. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Investing in crypto is the new norm as it helps people gain knowledge about money and helps them become financially free. This has led to a massive crypto trend which comes with an unforeseen risk attached to it. MarsRise was launched to help investors. MarsRise is a deflationary token found on the Binance Smart Chain, which comes with an automatic liquidity pool growth, and therefore the holder rewards through transaction taxation. The company has done all this to bring a community together on the mission to Mars.

This is a community-driven and equitably launched cryptocurrency. MarsRise also comes with a grand tokenomics. It has automated Liquidity & its Strategic Buyback is distributed to the locked liquidity on every transaction, making MarsRise one of the best in this game. 2% of all their passive income is distributed to all their holders on every transaction. While attracting users, project sustainability is a factor to consider; MarsRise has an impressive 3% enhancements in operations and marketing.

MarsRise was initially supplied with 1 quadrillion tokens, out of which almost fifty percent was burned on deployment, and the other 50% was launched on PancakeSwap. The token is up for grabs on Pancakeswap with a set slippage of 17%. Since the PancakeSwap runs on Binance Smart Chain, that is a blockchain with a much lower transaction cost when compared to bitcoin or Ethereum. Trading fees here are much lower than the other top decentralized exchanges, which dramatically benefits the users in ways comfortable to them. Having the highest trading volumes in the market, PancakeSwap is the leading decentralized exchange on the Binance Smart Chain.

MarsRise has revealed its future endeavors in its roadmap and named the "Roadmap 2021 our way to Mars." The project has also cleared the overall audit, hence making their contract 100% safe. They have received various certifications and know-how certificates essential to developing trust among their userbase, primarily that deals with crypto investments. Hence, the developers were thorough and ensured the website was safe enough to trust them without having any second thoughts.

MarsRise not only embodies reliability, but it is also user-friendly. The project has many unique endeavors and is on its way to building platforms like its own MarsWallet, followed by an innovative MarsSwap swapping platform in the coming years.

The Crypto Company also has a list of spectacular things planned in its roadmap. In a few weeks, they have planned to list MarsRise on Coingecko, LiveCointWatch, CoinMarketCap. They are planning on a Bsc update on the logo and details. They have also launched their cryptocurrency prices, charts, and market capitalizations. They have top-tier facilities such as Zero Team Allocation, an anti-whale system in action, an Anti-Rug Pull LP Locked, and the project is also fully Audited. They also plan on a long-term project. They also have many more projects to be unlocked.

Media Contact Details:

Name: MarsRiseWebsite: https://marsrise.net Email: [emailprotected] Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarsRise_bsc Telegram: https://t.me/MarsRiseBsc

All investment strategies and investments involve the risk of loss. Consider doing your own due diligence before making financial decisions related to any Cryptocurrency.

SOURCE MarsRise

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Adhara Prez Is the 8-Year-Old Genius Who Has An IQ Higher Than Stephen Hawking and Wants To Colonize Mars – mit inc

Posted: at 6:03 am

Credit: adhara_perez11

Adhara Prez is not your average eight-year-old. She doesnt have many friends. She dreams of traveling to space as an astronaut. Oh, and she has an IQ of 162two points higher than both Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein. Adhara Prez is so intelligent that she has finished elementary, middle, and high school. She is currently working on two college degrees.

She played with blocks, placing them all in rows, and constantly rocked while she ate in her highchair. She could spend hours like that, said her mother in an interview with Infobae Mexico. When Adhara was just 3 years old, doctors told Nallely that her daughter was on the autism spectrum (what was previously called Asperegers syndrome).

People with Asperegers typically have difficulty with social interactions and nonverbal communication. They can also have obsessive and repetitive behaviors, like Adhara placing all of her toy blocks in a row or rocking constantly.

When she was in school, they sent me messages [to tell me] that she was falling asleep. That she was apathetic, Nallely told Infobae. But at home, I saw that she knew the periodic table of elements. Since I was little, she knew algebra. I think she felt bored.

To make matters worse, Adhara was often bullied by other students. She was ostracized and called names like rara (weirdo) by the other kids. Nallely said her daughter was becoming depressed. To keep her daughter from suffering, Nallely took Adhara out of traditional schooling and put her in therapy. It was at therapy that a psychiatrist told Nallely to take her daughter to Talent Care Centre so she could be evaluated. It was there that experts discovered her unusually high IQ162. You only have to have an IQ of 130 to be considered gifted.

Adhara is studying Industrial Engineering at CNCI and gravitational waves and astronomy at the Astronomy Institute of UNAM. She has dreams of studying Astrophysics at the University of Arizona and is currently studying English so she can one day attend. Eventually, she wants to work for NASA and become an astronaut.

As Nallely Snchez explained to InfoBae: [Children with Asperegers] do want to have friends, but I feel like they dont know how [to make them]. It seems that they are in a world that they create. And they could spend all day talking about what they like, like dinosaurs. In the case of Adhara, her world is space.

Adharas biggest dream of all? I want to go to space to colonize Mars, she told Infobae.

Notice any needed corrections? Please email us at corrections@wearemitu.com

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Humans to Mars Summit 2021 is underway: Watch it live here. – Space.com

Posted: at 6:03 am

Day 3 of the annual Humans to Mars Summit kicks off in Washington, D.C. and online today (Sept. 15), and you can watch all the events virtually.

The three-day event, hosted by Explore Mars, will feature panel discussions and speakers from NASA as well as the agency's private and international partners.

"As we emerge from the COVID-19 crisis, Explore Mars plans to carefully introduce more and more in-person activities," Explore Mars CEO Chris Carberry said in a statement. "While H2M 2021 will bemostlyvirtual, if it is safe to do so we hope that our audiences around the world will conduct H2M gatherings at restaurants, bars, private homes, and other locations."

You can register to attend the virtual event for free at Eventbrite.com. You can also watch the webcasts live here below on Space.com, courtesy of Explore Mars. Also listed below is a schedule of events, and you can find a list of speakers here.

Related: A brief history of Mars missions

9:50-10:00 a.m. EDT Welcome and opening announcements

10:00-10:30 a.m. EDT A conversation with representative Ed Perlmutter (United States House of Representatives) facilitated by Lisa Callahan (Lockheed Martin CO, Vice President and General Manager - Commercial Civil Space)

10:35-11:30 a.m. EDT Artemis to Mars: an international collaboration

11:35-12:30 p.m. EDT Planet of Robots: Recent Milestones and Discoveries on Mars

1:15-2:00 p.m. EDT Robots and Humans: an Essential Partnership on the Moon and Mars Q&A

2:05-3:00 p.m. EDT Earth, Moon, Mars: Building a Sustainable Path to Mars

3:05-4:00 p.m. EDT Maintaining momentum: What can and should be achieved in the 2020s and 2030s?

7:00-8:00 p.m. EDT How can space exploration expand inclusiveness and diversity?

9:50-10:00 a.m. EDT Welcome and opening announcements

10:00-10:55 a.m. EDT Building a space workforce: inspiring and motivating preprofessional and early professionals

Moderator: Aaron Shepard (Electrical Engineer/ Science Communications)

Anthony Razo (SEDS, Board Chair)

Andrea Lloyd (US Geological Survey Earth Resources Operations and Science, Technical Specialist for the Landsat Program)

Morgan Irons (Deep Space Ecology, Founder & Chief Science Officer)

Owen Welch (Student, Senior at William T. Dwyer High School)

11:00-11:30 a.m. EDT A conversation with Bill Nelson (NASA Administrator) Facilitated by Janet Ivey (explore Mars, President)

11:35-12:30 p.m. EDT Making it on Mars: 3-D printing and sustainability

1:15-2:10 p.m. EDT Designing living space on Mars

2:15-3:15 p.m. EDT Nuclear propulsion/surface power

3:15-4:15 p.m. EDT A trajectory to Mars: advantages and challenges of long and short-stay missions to mars

Moderator: Tim Cichan (Lockheed Martin, Space Exploration Architect)

Hoppy Price (NASA JPL, Mars Orbital Mission 2033)

Bret Drake (The Aerospace Corporation, Associate Director, Space Systems Architecture)

Sharmi Watkins (NASA, Assistant Director for Exploration in NASAs Human Health and Performance Directorate)

9:50-10:00 a.m. EDT Welcome and opening announcements

10:00-10:30 a.m. EDT Hoppy Price (NASA JPL, Mars Orbital Mission 2033)

10:35-11:15 a.m. EDT Janet Ivey (Explore Mars, President) interviews Naeem Altaf (IBM, Distinguished Engineer & CTO Space Tech) on the IBM State of the Space Industry Report and the IBM Cubesat Project

11:20-12:15 p.m. EDT Utilizing resources

12:15-12:30 p.m. EDT TBA

12:30-1:00 p.m. EDT TBA

1:45-2:40 p.m. EDT How space exploration improves life on Earth

2:45-3:45 p.m. EDT EVA suits & operations

3:45-4:30 p.m. EDT Why Mars

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and onFacebook.

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SpaceX will send 4 civilians no astronauts to space. What will they do on the Inspiration4 mission? – KCRW

Posted: at 6:03 am

Elon Musks SpaceX is set to lift off from NASAs Kennedy Space Center on September 15 with an all-civilian crew for the first time. These four people had never been to space, and they spent six months training for it. The mission, called Inspiration4, is trying to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

Tech billionaire Jared Isaacman is funding Inspiration4 and will serve as commander. Hes an experienced pilot who used to fly fighter jets in stunt shows, says Mike Wall, senior writer for Space.com.

Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old physician assistant at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, is also part of the crew. As a child, she was treated at St. Jude for bone cancer. Shell be the first person in space with a prosthesis, which she has in her leg.

Scientist Sian Proctor and engineer Chris Sembroski are the other two people who will be aboard the rocket.

The team will be on an automated vehicle, so they dont have to do much driving, says Wall.

They shouldn't really have to do anything unless something really goes wrong, which you don't expect because SpaceX is a very capable company and has done a lot of this stuff before. But still, theoretically, it is a little scary to have nobody in the driver's seat who is like an experienced kind of astronaut.

He says the team will fly about 200 miles higher than Earth orbit, zoom around solo for about three days, and then return.

The cost for all this is an estimated $15 million per seat, though SpaceX and Isaacman havent released the details of their contract, explains Wall. You're looking at maybe $200 million out of pocket for Jared Isaacman, and he's also donated like $100 million straight to the research hospital of his own money.

Aside from raising money for the hospital, the point of the mission is to show the possibility of civilian spaceflight.

This is a step toward a future where hopefully, something like this will be a little more available. If you look at what SpaceX is doing with its next-generation spaceship that might be the real game changer, where people actually can do some of this stuff, and you don't have to be a billionaire to do it. That's their giant spaceship that's like 300 feet tall and it's going to hopefully make Mars colonization feasible. That's only a few years down the road maybe from being operational.

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10-year-old Mexican girl with perfect 162 score in IQ test has ambitions to colonize Mars – Republic World

Posted: at 6:03 am

While Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein have always remained on the list ofthe most intelligent people to have ever been born,the following discovery has added another name to the list. Mexico-based 10-year-old girl Adhara Prez Snchez is believed to have surpassed the intelligence quotient (IQ) of the aforementioned geniuses. Reportedly, the girl scored 162 in her IQ test, which was two more than Einstein and Hawking.

As per a report by Daily Star, the high schooler has already laid her plans to become an astronaut and has ambitions about colonising Mars. Asubject to bullying earlier, she madeherway ahead of her peersafter space caught her interest.Although her goal requires few years of patience, Sanchez has already enrolled for two degrees includingsystems engineering and industrial engineering at once,from a university in Mexico, sources reported.

As per media reports, Sanchez's talent was recognised when she started learning to read atjust three years of age and used to solve puzzle pieces followed by learning algebra. Surprisingly, the ten-year-old used to pass time at her home learning about elements in the periodic table, as per media reports.

Thetest taken by Sanchez proved that her IQ was two scores above that of theoretical physicists Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, who both had a score of 160. Media sources stated that she even has a unique education plan as she has graduated high school when she was just eight-years-old. Besides, the unusually intelligent girl has even given lectures on black holes when she represented her university Universidad CNCI, at an event hosted by Tijuana's Institute of Art and Culture. The girl is currently eyeingadmission in the University of Arizona, from where she intends to start her journey for NASA's space exploration programmes.

According to a2017 report by The Independent, an11-year-old Indian boy named Arnav Sharma had also scored 162 in his IQ tests making him match the levels of scientific geniuses. In 2019, another 10-year-old Birmingham based girl named Freya Mongotra had scored 162.People sitting for IQ tests need to cross the benchmark score of 140 score to enter the category of 'genius'.

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Italy and Qascom to Land First GNSS Receiver on the Moon – Inside GNSS

Posted: at 6:03 am

A 2023 lander in the moons Mare Crisium will carry the first GNSS receiver to that planets surface: the Navigation Early Investigation on Lunar surface (NEIL) receiver with software-defined radio (SDR) technology. The receiver will spring from agreements between the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the Italian firm Qascom srl.

The Qascom receiver will be part of the on-board payload of the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), defined in the ASI / NASA agreement, which aims to develop an activity in a lunar and cislunar environment. LuGRE will fly on one of NASAs Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) missions. The mission will also bring 9 other scientific and technological experiments to the Moon. Scheduled for the end of 2023, it will be launched with a Falcon 9 carrier from the Space X company.

Qascom will develop a GNSS reception system for ASI, consisting of a dual-frequency and dual-constellation receiver and the entire signal reception chain (antenna, LNA, filters), capable of supporting the extreme conditions of the moon. The system will be integrated aboard NASAs Blue Ghost lunar lander in early 2022. The weak signals from the side lobes of the GPS and Galileo satellite antennas (not designed to be used outside the Earth) will be processed with specific algorithms, allowing for positioning. space and time, albeit with reduced accuracy, while cruising to the Moon, in lunar orbit and on the surface of the Moon itself.

For the first time in history, almost 400,000 km away, positioning will be tested with both GPS and Galileo systems. Currently the records in calculating the position of a spacecraft using GNSS satellites stands at 200,000 km, reached by NASA in 2019 with thefourMagnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) spacecraft. MMS success indicated that spacecraft may be able to navigate via GNSS as far away as the moon, which will prove important to the Gateway, a planned space station in lunar orbit.

The collaboration between the Italian Space Agency and NASA in the navigation sector ultimately points toward future colonization of the moon and later of Mars. NEIL constitutes an important step, both on a technical and scientific level, for future lunar missions, as it will allow us to understand how GPS and Galileo can be exploited on the Moon for positioning and time of the lunar orbiting station (Gateway), for the constellations of lunar satellites, the Artemis programs . The raw data collected and processed will be made available to the scientific community to study the lunar and cislunar environment and evaluate the future use of GNSS and its evolutions to support permanent missions. The Artemis generation of lunar explorers will establish a sustained human presence on the Moon, prospecting for resources, making revolutionary discoveries, and proving technologies key to future deep space exploration.

Mare Crisium is visible from Earth with the naked eye as a small dark spot on the edge of the Moons face. It is also the location of Luna City, a fictional city featured in the science fiction novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein.

NEIL was also named in honor of Neil Armstrong, the first human to touch lunar soil.

Image credit:NASA

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The Rock That Ended the Dinosaurs Was Much More Than a Dino Killer – The New York Times

Posted: at 6:03 am

Dr. Gulick also noted that the study highlighted the hazards that asteroids pose across time, including risks faced by our planet-bound civilization. The Chicxulub impact and the fate of the dinosaurs are frequently invoked as the ultimate argument both for investing in planetary defense research, and for expanding our species beyond Earth. (Although its worth noting that other worlds, including Mars, are not exempt from large-scale asteroid impacts.)

But Chicxulub also sheds light on some of the most evocative questions about the emergence of life. Dr. Kring has long been fascinated by this subject, and has helped produce a wealth of research about the microbial ecosystems that cropped up in the fallout of the apocalyptic event.

Theres an argument that stipulates that this type of bombardment is involved in not only the perturbation of the evolution of life, but actually involved in the origin of life on our planet, he said. Understanding these processes is important, and our best measures of some of these consequences on Earth are going to come from the youngest of these impactors, like Chicxulub, because the evidence is more robust.

The mission Dr. Gulick helped lead continues to clarify the impacts role as both a destroyer and a crucible of life. As the researchers plumbed the depths of the buried Doomsday event, they found dusty traces of the impactor, sandy backwash from the tsunami it had created and the fossilized remains of organisms that thrived in its aftermath.

Perhaps most astonishing, a study published this summer described modern-day microbial descendants of those early crater adopters, still living in the shadow of the catastrophe that was colonized by their forebears.

Its amazing to me that you can have an impact and you can generate an ecosystem, then 66 million years later, you still have life that is present in that location because of this previous condition, Dr. Gulick said. On a bigger scale, maybe you can generate habitats with impacts really early in Earths history and have ecosystems survive afterward. That reflects one of the ways in which you might get life going.

In this sense, the Chicxulub impactor truly does have galactic implications as a time capsule of both biological disaster and the birth of new life. Other life-bearing worlds across the Milky Way might be similarly shaped by asteroid impacts, with tales of destruction and recovery all their own.

This is an issue that potentially goes far beyond the extinction of dinosaurs, Dr. Kring said.

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The tragically misguided zeal of US anti-vaccination libertarians – Mint

Posted: at 5:51 am

Axioms about self-reliance can have fatal and devastating consequences, as the United States is finding out. The worlds most powerful country is experiencing an inexplicably incredible saga over vaccines. The roll-out of vaccines has been astonishingly successfulthe nation is now awash with vaccines and it is able to give a booster dose to everyone. You can get your shots at pharmacies; you need not be a citizen; you do not have to pay for the vaccination.

And yet, a substantial minority of the US stubbornly refuses to get vaccinated.

The state is exasperated. Some cities have passed mandates requiring private businesses to deny entry to gyms, malls, and restaurants to the unvaccinated. Employers are asked to ensure that their staff is vaccinated. Colleges and universities have set rules on masking and vaccine protection, and courts have agreed with these rules.

And yet, naysayers oppose covid jabs. Some health workers are threatening to resign because they remain unconvinced of the vaccines effectiveness. Many see a matter of public health as a privacy intrusion. When I landed in Entebbe a few years ago, I did not know that Uganda had had a yellow fever outbreak and needed me to show that I had a certificate proving I had received my yellow-fever shot. The airline hadnt told me, and Uganda was not on the list.

I wasnt carrying my World Health Organization-authorized certification, and so I was asked to get injected (for about $30) at a WHO kiosk, and I did. Millions have had to show evidence of immunity from certain diseases upon arrival in many countries. But Americas neo-libertarians want to say no.

So the state has reacted, as it must. President Joe Biden has made vaccine mandatory for federal employees and urged the private sector to do the same. Some companies are imposing costs on the unvaccinated by raising their health insurance premiums. Social relations are fraying. people are being disinvited from weddings unless they can somehow promise they are vaccinated.

The irony is that those who usually resent state power and intrusion (like me) support mandatory vaccination (except for those who have health- related reasons), and those who usually dont care for others liberties want to say no. The unvaccinated are getting blamed for the spread of the Delta variant. They are scouring the internet looking for maverick scientists who put together charts and toss around scientific terminology to sanctify their scepticism and give it an undeserved intellectual veneer, as the naysayers cling to their beliefs. Meanwhile, obtuse talk-show hosts who had refused to get vaccinated have fallen sick. Some have died, and a few have admitted on their death-bed that they were wrong.

Meanwhile, intensive care units at US hospitals are getting crowded and critical care is denied to patients of other serious illnesses, including cancer and heart attacks, because the covid- affected are getting the beds that others would have got. If only the unvaccinated had taken their shots.

It is clear that this is now a pandemic of the unmasked and the unvaccinated.

To be sure, vaccines wont make you immortal. But the vaccinated are less likely to fall seriously ill, and far less likely to die because of covid infection, than those who refuse to mask up or say no to the jab. The American map of parts of the country that are well vaccinated and those that arent looks like the map of a nation at civil war.

And yet, many refuse to get their covid shots. The blame lies as much with Americas self-destructive cultural wars and the ease with which misinformation spreads. The harsh but simple truth of the US is: If you voted Trump, you are more likely to be unvaccinated. Trumpian governors, like Floridas Ron deSantis and Texas Greg Abbott, are seen to perpetuate these attitudes.

The unvaccinated deserve protection, but the case for this is far weaker if they have ignored federal health advisories. Individual rights matter, but if an assertion of these rights harms the rights of other individuals, then a viable compromise has to be found to mitigate the harm to the many.

True, a person has the right to wave his arms around, but if those arms strike another person, then the arm-waver needs to be restrained. It is that simple; it is what the American Civil Liberties Union has stressed. The ACLU has never been shy of fighting unpopular causes. Years ago, in a famous case, it had defended the right of post-war Nazis to march through a street in Skokie, Illinois, where Holocaust survivors lived. Its lawyers have also defended prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, including those who were arrested for supporting terrorism, because everything about that infamous US-run prison violated the right to a fair trial that everyone must have.

Democracies have always recognized the challenge of persuading people rather than forcing them to do something. Vaccine mandates may seem like an outrageous leap into the unknown, policy-wise, but the rights of the vulnerable too matter.

Salil Tripathi is a writer based in New York. Read Salils previous Mint columns at http://www.livemint.com/saliltripathi

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The tragically misguided zeal of US anti-vaccination libertarians - Mint

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