Question: If we had a life with no pain killers, drugs or antibiotics to combat illnesses would our immune system be better in comparison to our immune systems today? Would the population of humans inhabiting Earth would be high or quite low? Also, from answering this question was it a mistake that we found antibiotics?

Robert Hampson answered on 19 Nov 2014:

Our immune systems would be devastated by the regular ravages of avoidable disease. We would likely be hideously scarred by the various diseases we had survived on the way to adulthood. It is likely we’d be in constant pain because of the results of some of those diseases. The population would probably be quite low with the majority of the population being children because child death would be so common that women would have to have 10-15 kids just to see 1 or 2 make it to adulthood.

No, the discovery of antibiotics, or pain killers or other drugs is not a mistake. Often if we make them available in developing countries and improve sanitation and nutrition and try to alleviate poverty, the birth rate per woman plummets reducing population problems over the long term.

In the rich west, the birth rate is often actually slightly below the replacement rate (i.e. our population is very slowly shrinking as their aren’t quite as many babies born as people dying). Immigration is often the only thing that keeps our population growing and within one or two generations the fertility rate in immigrant families also plummets in comparison to their countries of origin to a rate very similar to the national average.

The answer to the population is education, alleviating poverty and improving living conditions as then women are likely to have smaller healthier families.