7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly)
#1.
Weapons and the People Who Use Them
As we touched on briefly above, if Homo sapiens are good at one thing, it's killing other things. We're so good at it that we've made entire other species cease to exist without even trying. Add to the mix the sheer number of armed rednecks and hunters out there, and the zombies don't even stand a chance. There were over 14 million people hunting with a license in the U.S. in 2004. At a minimum, that's like an armed force the size of the great Los Angeles area.
Remember, the whole reason hunting licenses exist is to limit the number of animals you're allowed to kill, because if you just declared free reign for everybody with a gun, everything in the forest would be dead by sundown. Even the trees would be mounted proudly above the late-arriving hunter's mantles. It's safe to assume that when the game changes from "three deer" to "all the rotting dead people trying to eat us," there will be no shortage of volunteers.
Plus, if we look at zombies as a species, they are pretty much designed for failure. Their main form of reproduction is also their only source of food and their top predator. If they want to eat or reproduce, they have to go toe to toe with their number one predator every single time. That's like having to fight a lion every time you to want to have sex or make a sandwich. Actually, it's worse than that: Most top predators are only armed with teeth and claws, meaning they have to put themselves in harm's way to score a kill. Humans have rifles.
Harm's way is about 4875 feet from the end of this.
The zombies have no choice but to walk into bullets. And all this isn't even counting all the other household hand guns in the world, nor the fact that zombies also have to contend with IEDs, Molotov cocktails, baseball bats, crowbars and cars that the general public will no doubt be using to cull their numbers.
And that's just from the civilian population; counting the military and police, we have another three million or so armed people, and instead of just handguns shotguns and hunting rifles, they have machine guns, combat shotguns, sniper rifles, assault rifles, sub-machine guns, grenade launchers and the occasional taser, not to mention the training to use them effectively. But why would they even bother? When they could just roll over swaths of zombies in tanks, blast them with cluster bombs and MOABs and mow them down with miniguns from the god damn Air Force that every zombie flick seems to forget about.
Really, even if zombies existed right now, the whole concept of a zombie apocalypse is just laughable. Now robots, on the other hand...
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The only problem I foresee here is the overestimation of the human and the underestimation of the zombie. Zombies won't be wandering around in the Rockies, or in the arctic tundra, because there are no damn humans there. They go where we go, generally using the same routes we used, because we used them. Navigating anything for a zombie is usually as simple as following the food. The debate over zombies vs ladders still rages. Also, zombies come from people. Wherever the most people are, that's where the most zombies will eventually be. And when there are zombies where there are people, panic is inevitable. I estimate 6 of 10 civilians will do nothing or worse when confronted with a zombie, generously. Mostly because so many people are not exposed to that kind of violence with any regularity. Whilst the military will mount an admirable offense, the enemy will be among the civilians, causing widespread hysteria like we already see today sans undead. Then the military will be forced to choose between protecting the innocent and eliminating the threat, greatly diminishing their effectiveness and morale. Long story short, things never go as well as expected.
ReplyThis article is completly missing the point that there's more than one type of zombies. Zombies could be caused by an uprgraded mad cow-like desiese or something to that extent, (upgraded to shut off the part of our brain that makes us human or preventing us from producing seritonin) in which case the bodies would still be alive, therefore they would be more resitant to the elements. Something like that would infect a massive amount of people through the meat we consume at one time... So now you would have thousands of human zombies being treated for this unknown illness in hospitols filled with people. Now, the zombies would have only their primitive instincts and rage. Now say a rat gets infected, wether a zombie bites one or it comes in contact with the blood... it only takes one or two, that rat will spread it to other rats who would now be crawling out of the walls carrying the virus, and infecting people. And yes, the zombies would eventually rot or whatever, but it would take at leasst a couplele of months... enough time to kill of AT LEAST half the worlds population, causing us to start the world anew (an apocolypse). This is just one exaple of a possible zombie apocolypse. Also, I don't know where you live but barely anyone in suburbs and cities don't know how to load or shoot a gun... areas which would have the most infected... and yeah, actually, people do act like paniced morons when theyre in a disaster situation... watch some tru tv.
ReplyEvery point made here is dismissed by The Zombie Survival Guide. The book gives detailed reasons why an outbreak would spread and possibly bring us to extinction. Biggest reason being, a human kills a zombie, it's just a dead body. Zombie kills a human, there's a new zombie. Zombies win by numbers, not by superior tactics or technology. Not to mention modern warfare would have very little effect on the undead. The military still relies on psyching out the enemy. You can't psyche a zombie out, it's not scared away by the might of weaponry, they'll just keep coming. Plus, it's a fictional creature, if anything like a zombie virus did develop and cause, I dunno, 28 days later style rage or something, it would spread too much before the government starts to think "Well, maybe it IS a zombie outbreak, even though we dismissed that idea as nonsense."
ReplyThe biggest hindrance to a zombie apocalypse is that we know what zombies are. If what is shown over and over in movies and video games were to actually happen, the developed world would crap a brick and get down to killing them as fast as possible, and don't even act like there wouldn't be a surplus of volunteers. You know every teenager would jizz his pants at the thought of having won the damn zombie war. THAT is the kind of accomplishment that you can lord over your children, their children, and their children after that, and there'd be a lot of kids because if that wouldn't get you laid nothing will.
ReplyHmmm.... In my opinion, I think everything still depends on what these "things" truly are.
ReplyConsider the following fact:
Everything we know (or we think we know) about zombies are, in the most basic sense of the word, fiction. We claim, inter alia, that they can't survive without a head, transfer infections orally, etc., but, truth be told, these are things we are yet to prove. Who knows what a zombie outbreak will look like? What if they can transfer through saliva, their breaths or simply their corpses lying around?
On another note, and in my humble opinion, I think the article overestimated a few things, such as the human race fighting back with a vengeance. The fact of the matter is, a majority of us are too concerned with our daily lives that we can't possibly go around arming ourselves and suddenly flying on a killing spree at the first sign of trouble.
Of course, I believe it depends on the situation. If it occurs in a controlled environment, sure, it can be contained. But in a highly populated urban area where people are constantly toiling with their mediocre lives? Maybe or maybe not. Again, it all depends on circumstance and coincidence.
What if the infection began in a train (subway, MRT, etc.), by the time the authorities get there, a hundred zombies would've already been reanimated. And what if the trains continue with its route? Every station will have its share of infected and what follows next would be simple math.
Another point to consider is the people's initial reaction(s). If you saw a dude (who barely looks like a zombie, but is infected), suddenly chowing the sh-t out of another, would you stand up, declare war on the zombie race and slash its head? Of course not. You might piss your pants, go into shock, run away or faint even. If you're a battle-hardened motherf----, then you might not be fazed by it. But what about the other millions of civilians out there who's only experience with blood, gore and death are with the movies?
Furthermore.... Wait, I'm writing too much. And nobody's gonna read this anyway so.... BOOBS.
Mission accomplished.
he he, Boobs! Good one
Wait reason number 7 eating zombies turns animals into animal zombies get it?
ReplyA lot of people in the comments are saying how if there were above-average zombies like those spurned by nanotechnology or immune to the extreme heat and cold and moderately intelligent and the like but I think # 1 is the big kicker. No matter how you cut it, it's universally accepted that if you destroy its head, a zombie's history. They still need the brain to keep moving. So, again, the military wouldn't need to intervene. A simple suburban neighborhood will be able to take out an army of zombies with minimal casualties. We are too smart and too hard to kill and, oh yeah, WE HAVE GODDAMNED GUNS!
ReplyNew Zealand would be screwed.
@ eskimo56: that's because it's just plain silly for a society to not have an armed citizenry.
I love zombie movies, but another item on the "suspension of disbelief" list is: why don't zombies just eat other zombies? Lots of animals live just fine eating carrion.
ReplyBut what about infected people, not zombies?
ReplyThey did say Zombie, not Infected (though I personally don't care about the subtleties).
you made zombies not fun! I'm taking my movies home!
ReplyI think it's possible, because some diseases don't activate until they have replicated enough to be effective. Depending on the outbreak, the disease could spread all over before someone actually experiences the affects and governments take a break from stuffing their wallets to believe and take action in what's going on. With a disease similar to rabies, the zombie can still nourish itself and do other bodily functions, but will, in all other ways, be fucked up.
ReplySecond, sure, the animals might start attacking the zombies, but infections are rarely specie- specific, and them coming into contact would only accelerate the process..
Way too many holes in this article...opening paragraph, for instance; People are already zombies. The main bulk of the population, the 95% of us, go about our daily lives in a stupor, recreating yesterday today and again tomorrow, routine controlling every aspect of rational thought. We are workforce cattle, moving from task to task without a thought, only repetition and muscle memory guiding our actions. Raw instinct has been removed from all but a small percentage of us. We eat at noon, not because we're hungry, but because that's when we eat every day. We take a piss when work allows us to step away for a moment to perform this most simple of human impulses.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesA slight break in the routine existence of humanity, one small change that interrupts our cycle of repetition...chaos ensues. Say a car were driving on the sidewalk...most people would just freeze and become gutter slag. We are so caught in this day after day reality that we can't react to new situations fast enough to save our own asses. Now place a crazed rotting human looking psychopath coming at you trying to eat your flesh and spread its disease into that category of routine interference. Zombie apocalypse.
It only takes one bite.
I don't have time to debunk your other reasons. I am, myself, a member of the human zombie workforce (US Air Force, proud member of corporate America). I will, however, quickly suggest you read "World War Z". That should suffice to debunk almost everything else in this article, particularly the last paragraph.
I don't doubt that humanity would pull its head out of its ass before mankind was completely wiped out, but only after the initial shock of it all had wiped out o majority of the population. It would take a major, worldwide tragedy, something on every single living persons front doorstep, (a zombie apocalypse for instance) to give us the bitch-slap we need for the "de-zombification" of what we currently call...um...humanity?
Firstly, what I did today was go to class (I’m in college), then I talked to a friend of mine for a while, then I went home and played around on the internet, then ate fried fish with my family (we don’t generally eat out), then I talked to my older sister, then I made a cracked account to reply to this comment. And ya know what; I had a pretty nice day. Sure I do variations of those things most days (except make cracked accounts), but doing similar things throughout the week doesn’t cause someone to go through life in a stupor; becoming a living zombie.
Now, mainlining pessimism directly into your bloodstream might, but you described yourself as part of the “workforce cattle” yet seem to have retained enough rational thought to right this wonderful comment. And hey, odds are you didn’t read this article every day for the past week so you’ve already added some diversity to your schedule ;)
I have pretty nice days, lots of people I know have pretty nice or at the very least tolerable days, and overall people are pretty happy where I live. So ether you’ve lived in some exceptionally bad places or I just live in possible the happiest place in America. Still, I think you went a bit wild with the hyperbole concerning how people go through their lives in your comment.
Secondly, as far as standing still when a car is coming directly at you. If a cat jumps out at me from some bushes, I generally go flying in the opposite direction as fast as my legs can take me. I wouldn’t even be in the same town if a car came roaring up the sidewalk towards me. I believe the term for this reaction is “fight or flight.” What I’m getting at is only a very small portion of the population would freeze if something dangerous was coming towards them. Of those few, I’m guessing even less would freeze because seeing a car coming towards them is such a change from their normal schedule that their brain is unable to possess the danger.
Thirdly, thank you for serving our country.
Just put evolution in the holes, and everithing is solved. :-)
*everything.
Seriously! Africa!? Do you really think we all, in Africa, live amongst the "Lions, cape Buffalo, Hippo's, Rhinos and Ellies"?!
ReplyJeez, you Americans!!
hahahahah, anyway... good article anyhoo :)
Are you trying to imply that "Lions, cape Buffalo, Hippo's, Rhinos and Ellies" don't actually live in Africa? Because I've always secretly suspected that.
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ReplyAre the cougars there to eat the zombies?
The thing about this article and its opponent (reasons how a zombie are possible) is that this article refers mostly to the stereotypical slow shambling rotting corpse zombie. Assuming that the nano-cyborg zombies or any of the other one maintain the ability to run and to also keep basic bodily functions, then the threat becomes a lot more real. Still unlikely for a global apocalypse but still, it'd be a s**t week.
ReplyYep, even though Max Brooks Zombies avoided some of these scenarios, the rest of them make it impossible for zombies to take over the world. Cant wait for WWZ to come out in theaters though.
ReplyWould a dog die if it bit a zombie? Or would it just become a zombie itself? -.-
ReplyI'm not sure if the mass majority has dog zombies. I have only noticed them in Resident Evil games and their subsequent movies that follow the mythos. It's rare to have a disease that jumps species. I suppose it could happen though, humans DO get rabies. They touched on it in the article, but the transfer of rabies is pretty much the same, and you don't see an outbreak of human rabies
I've said it before and I'll say it again, if a zombie apocalypse breaks out, im sure Australia's going o be the one place untouched. However given the option of flesh eating dead people slowly eating me alive,or relocating to Australia,I think i'll stick with the dead guys. Seriously there is ZERO chance of me ever wanting to step foot on that hell island. I'd be dead in half a second if that...
ReplyThat's harsh, its a really nice place here, sure everything and its mother is poisonous, but just stay away from them, and out of the sun, and water. Actually yeah, you stay and be eaten, we'll do fine without you.
Hey man just saying, as pretty as it is, it just aint worth the risk. But hey on the upside assuming an outbreak didnt happen there and Australia doesnt kill its human inhabitants, you guys get complete control of earth so enjoy :)
Maggots will always be absolutaly disgusting. Just the word "maggot" make me want to barf.
ReplyWhy?
They're delicious, especially after being barfed.
There are different types of "zombies". From this article it sounds like it's speaking from a scientific understanding of the human and a standard "undead" zombie. Now what is a zombie? From my understanding it's a mindless, souless corpse. But the classificatoin of zombie goes for a whole bunch of things. The movie "Mutants" has zombies but they aren't undead they are just mutated creatures. The video game "Siren" has shibito which can translate as corpse person but in essence shibito are more like beings possessed by demons but they are classified as zombies in American gamers eyes. So there is a spirtual aspect of zombies. Parasites can cause "zombies" in the sense that they are mindless human beings that have one task, and that's whatever the parasite wants. So there are different types of zombies depending on how you look at it, "The walking dead" zombies might not be possible but there are sure other ways to get a zombie apocalypse.
ReplyYou still have the guns.