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7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail
Whether they spoil in the heat, freeze in the winter, or get taken out by a human-friendly venue of vultures, a zombie outbreak is unlikely to succeed. Here's 7 reasons why we should stop worrying about the shambling dead and start concentrating on a real threat: sparkly vampires.
There are no zombies?
This article is the reason why idle.slashdot.org exists.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Come on now. Everyone know if you eat zombie flesh you become a zombie. Before you know it we'll be up to our necks in zombie lion, zombie tiger and zombie bears. However, zombie birds will probably be the worst considering the distances they can cover.
So, so tired of zombies, pirates, ninjas, and robots. Jesus, Internet, can you please latch on to something else? Anything? I know whatever it is you latch on to will still get annoying, with 18 year old girls running around pretending to be cute and funny, but just being fucking annoying, but for the love of god, let the Zombie bullshit die.
You wouldn't be saying that if you'd met some of my managers.
Brain dead - check; stumbling through life - check; rampant desire to eat people's brains (or simply recruit them to their own viewpoint) - check.
QED.
davel
dot-sig.
This person is claiming that zombie outbreaks will fail, but where is the evidence? Has there ever been a zombie outbreak that has actually failed for any of these reasons?
It all seems like blind optimism to me.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
We got em, they don't. To quote another fictional character, Neo, "Guns, lots of guns"
There are two pages to the article. Why you link to the second one instead of the main one is beyond me.
Yes I know people complain about the editors and the like, but is it really that much to ask to link to the main page?
They're DEAD. As in no more. Ceased to be. Gone off to meet their maker. Bereft of life. Shuffled off their mortal coils.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
Link points to page 2 of 2. Here's page 1: 7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly) | Cracked.com
I, for one, leave it to the US to deal with zombie outbreaks. You, guys have so many weapons stashed up it would be a joke to deal with a couple of zombies. Just get to Europe, will ya?
Sure, like how "we" handled Katrina? The BP spill? Wonderful. The first official act would be to round up all the survivors and confiscate their weapons, then leave them in a stadium with no supplies. Then just one infected gets mixed in with the others...
Zombies feed on brains. Thanks to our fine educational system, we'll starve them out.
Have gnu, will travel.
Zombies are the new vampires, and to date none of them sparkle in the sun.
Want to know why zombies are so cool? Because Hollywood will never be able to get 14 year old girls interested in crappy zombie romance/emo books and movies....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I especially like the point about the sheer number of armed individuals. Makes me think the only semi-viable zombie outbreak scenario is something like Highschool of The Dead, where an outbreak occurs in urban Japan.
But even in Japan, I don't imagine an outbreak would last very long.
I doubt the zombies have much to worry about from the Japanese police though, they've already had an aversion to using their guns ingrained in them through training. Add to that the stress and sheer 'omgwtfbbq'-ness of the situation, and I think it'd be more likely to see many of them either completely freaking out, or making an ultimately futile effort to use batons and riot shields against the zombies. And even the ones that actually use their firearms against the zombies will quickly go through all the ammunition they have access to and be screwed.
I imagine the JGSDF would fare a lot better, even with the psychological factors. The question is, how badly outnumbered would they be by the time someone thinks to officially mobilize them?
But hey, if all else fails, the US military presence in Japan could probably take care of it themselves. I wonder what kind of legal and bureaucratic messes would be involved in mobilizing the US military for actual combat operations on Japanese soil, even in an emergency...
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Large groups of pathetic unthinking masses trying to kill all non-them. At the accelerations of stupidity coming into conservative America via. Fox news using false analogies, I would say arm yourself hard right now, because in about 1-2 years, they will have degraded into manic destructive psychotic mobs. Hell, they are already bringing guns to protests and protesting several parts of the constitution. I have been attacked for being an atheist, despite all the good things I have done for my society, by people who find nothing wrong with cheating, stealing, lying, or hating. Give it a couple months. Although living zombies only take dismemberment before dying. undead zombies on the otherhand would most certainly be devoured by vultures (just look at the vultures following armies in the civil war, due to the high amount of death and long time fighting).
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
You need to watch out. If you aren;t careful you are going to start using the word 'sheeple', and there's no hope for you at that point.
Grills glinting in the sunlight as they shuffle towards you.
No sig today...
You want scientific? Ok, here you go: http://www.mathstat.uottawa.ca/~rsmith/Zombies.pdf It is a mathematical model of how the zombies will spread.
It is not as optimistic as cracked.com I am afraid.
"he, who has quotes in his signature, is a douche" - unknown.
Actually, while humanity had a ton of imagination when it comes to fearing death, nothing even came close to the modern idea of vampire.
What Europe believed in is better described as "revenants", or what we nowadays think of as "zombies." They weren't supposed to be some clever and scheming count, but mindless bloated corpses of some peasants.
Oh, and generally they'd transmit disease generally by just being there not by bit. Remember it was an era where even an educated medicus knew that diseases are transmitted by smells (no, really, the miasma theory of disease) and everyone else knew that corpses cause disease. A corpse walking around was a health hazard by itself.
And just to drive the "zombie" aspect home, most of these were supposed to be literally brain dead. E.g., the ones from an outbreak in Venice could be prevented from biting anything ever again by just shoving a brick in the corpse's mouth. Your average Dracula or White Wolf kinda vampire would be sentient enough to basically go "oh, i have a brick in my mouth" and spit it out. Heck, even the dumbest animal would. But the version those people believed in would be forever thwarted by that brick because they weren't even able to figure that out.
Other forms of thwarting an undead included the equivalent of the frat prank of tying someone's shoelaces together, except it was more like tying the ends a piece of string to the big toe on each foot. Yep, that would thwart them.
Even when myths gave them a couple of neurons still working, then they'd be riddled with a crippling OCD, so they'd irresistably stop and count the grains in a pile of rice or whatever.
Basically they're not quite the smart and scheming baron kind, nor the kind who'd blend in and maintain a Masquerade. They were mindless rotting corpses.
The modern idea of a Vampire was pretty much used invented by Polidori in "The Vampyre", sort of reused in "Carmilla" (where it got some sexual part added too), but only really became mass known via "Dracula". It's really not about any single "ancient" myth, but a mix of several of those. Including a lot of the witchcraft beliefs, incubus beliefs, and various assorted other bits and ends. And yes, some stuff taken from fairies too.
Basically what Polidori, Le Fanu and Stoker did there was already inventing a new kind of vampire and romanticizing it to appeal to their target audience. That was it, really. And each of them felt free to add a few personal touches and mix some even more unrelated mythical monsters to the definition of a Vampire, to make it even more mass-appeal. Which is basically why you've heard of Dracula over and over again, but most people never even heard of Carmilla or The Vampyre.
Complaining that someone else did the same thing is a bit silly. Yes, Twilight included some stuff from an unrelated mythical beastie. What, unlike Stoker, Anne Rice, White Wolf and everyone else... who added bits from unrelated mythical beasties too?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.