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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?
also, please link to the first page of the story:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18683_7-scientific-reasons-zombie-outbreak-would-fail-quickly.html
"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.
No, that article is the reason cracked.com exists.
This response is the reason idle.slashdot.org exists.
7. Natural predators can become zombies, too. Then where will your living natural predators be, hmm?
6. Zombies rose from the dead, some years-dead. Making them deader by drying them out isn't going to affect them.
6. Zombies rose from the dead. Dead is even more inert than frozen. Therefore, frozen isn't going to faze them.
5. Biting works for rattlesnakes, black widow spiders, rabid dogs, and yucky girls with cooties. Zombies are onto a business model here.
3. It's not like we're picking a Zombie President early in the cycle. There are zillions of them. Damage to one leaves another undamaged. You can't beat them in reasonable time with iterative solutions.
2. You can run. You can hide. But death comes to us all. And then you'll be the zombie in the place behind the incorrectly designated zombie-proof barrier.
1. Unless you plan to make bullets out of zombie finger bones, you're going to run out of bullets before you run out of zombies. Zillions, man. Zillions.
Yes, there are two rule sixes, and NOOOOOOO...rule four. Clearly not a Python sketch.
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?
Zombies feed on brains. Thanks to our fine educational system, we'll starve them out.
Have gnu, will travel.
You actually read the f'ing article?
I'd ask if you're new here, but judging from your user ID, you actually are.
At least you're grumbling about the editors so I think you'll fit in okay here.
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!
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.