This post originally appeared on Randi.org
Bent on gorging ourselves on bleak and bloody visions of our own destruction, pop culture as of late has been zombified. These shambling simulacrums of our own mortality have broken through the boarded-up doors of our hearts and gnawed lovingly on our brains. This resurgence of a classic horror genre is obviously a welcome one, as exemplified by the success of shows like The Walking Dead, and the fact that the CDC used a zombie apocalypse scenario as a PSA for disaster preparedness.
Zombie doodle courtesy of Sara E. Mayhew
Seemingly everyone has had their love of zombies reanimated: mathematicians published a paper modeling a zombie outbreak to examine pandemics, researchers and students at the Large Hadron Collider made a full-length zombie movie in between particle smashings, and popular video games from Red Dead Redemption to Call of Duty all have joined the brain-matter-hungry mob.
It’s a good thing, if we can believe any zombie-themed media, zombies don’t actually exist. Nearly every outcome is Mad-Max or Fallout. It’s undoubtedly fun, and rather macabre, to speculate how a virus-spreading and ever-growing gang of gangrenous flesh gorgers would ruin our world (or at least a city or three). The zombie apocalypse is then a tried and true thought experiment combining our fascination with death and gore with epidemiology and disease.
But a zombie-laden thought experiment needs a counterpoint. Allow me: a zombie apocalypse would never happen.
All the Worlds a Stage…For a Zombie Apocalypse
First things first. Any discussion of a zombie apocalypse (from now on ZA) needs to get its canon straight. Are we talking about the Dawn of the Dead zombies, slow-moving and mindless undead, or are we talking about 28 Days Later zombies, objectively terrifying with ferocious speed and viral transmission?
I suppose if we take the “average” zombie portrayal, we are talking about zombies from shows like The Walking Dead: mindless, slow-moving, rotting human corpses, both hungry for human flesh and able to “turn” individuals unfortunate enough to be bitten.
We also have to imagine a stage—how the ZA got started. Was it a virus, an unholy rising, a parasitic takeover akin to the Ophiocordyceps parasitic fungus that forces ants to distribute spores before killing them? Again, the most popular scenario seems to be a virus spread by an unlucky chomp from a bloodthirsty ghoul.
Finally, let’s also suppose, as in The Walking Dead, that there is a national (or even global) simultaneous zombie outbreak. Here is where, if we aren’t to fully suspend our powers of critical thought, a ZA’s plausibility drops dramatically, like a zombie run through its rotting brain. We give ourselves far too little credit. Humans are amazingly talented killers.
Winning World War Z
Zombies would not be the terrors we make them out to be (if we must argue realistically about something that isn’t real). They lack the two things that make humans dangerous in the first place: having a mind and being able to run. Speed and endurance running, combined with the ability to plan, coordinate, and to use tools/weapons, makes for a dangerous animal. A zombie is like a toothless shark that can no longer gracefully cruise the shoals.
But what about the numbers? The inherent danger of a ZA isn’t the risk posed by one hungry corpse, but by an onslaught of them, perhaps shoving themselves grotesquely through your shattered first floor windows and splintered doors. Here is where zombie narratives sell humanity short.
Humans are skilled murderers, time and again proven excellent at killing, especially each other. Consider the history of genocide; how good we are at killing other humans who can think and plan and run away, in mass amounts. Why would it be harder to kill non-thinking, slow moving humans if we are already so good at killing ourselves?
Try a simple thought experiment, channeling the terror of a house surrounded. Say you have 25 individuals who are set on eating your face. Would you prefer them to be live humans or undead zombies? Most people I believe would choose the zombies. Even the dumbest humans are more dangerous than a pack of mindless meat sacks. Even unarmed people are scary.
But what about the global outbreak? At last estimate, human existence is at least partially responsible (through deforestation, human expansion, etc.) for the extinction of at least 100 species of other organisms every 24 hours. With no goal, no survival instinct rallying humanity to push back from the brink, we casually obliterate entire genetic lineages. If we had the goal of wiping out an outbreak of slow moving packs of rotten meat, we would be violently capable.
And speaking to the idea of a contagious virus, if the CDC can eradiate malaria from the US, we could handle a zombie outbreak.
But what if the military or police force falls? You’ll forgive me for being a bit evasive on an answer to an imaginary disaster, but the military wouldn’t succumb to a mindless mob. An overrun defense force is merely a plot device. In the ZA narratives that use it, they take away the military because it makes for a boring story if they didn’t.
Why a military force would fall, especially as terrifying and well-equipped as America’s, has never been explained. Jets and bombs and drones and tanks and Apache helicopters and rocket launchers and Gatling guns that can fire 3,000 rounds a minute. Does any of this arsenal, feared (and lamented) by the rest of the developed world, suggest a simultaneous and catastrophic demise brought on by senseless automatons?
But what about the environment? Admittedly, being trapped in a city overrun by the undead isn’t ideal, but it isn’t a death sentence, nor is it representative of most of the country (or the world). America itself is so big, that even if 90% of the US population were zombified, a zombie encounter would be few and far-between (if evenly distributed). The country of wide, open spaces means that there is almost always a place you can run.
And where do you run? Anywhere cold. One or two winters in the boreal forests of Canada, for example, with its freezing temperatures and healthy bear/wolf/cougar population, would make short work of slow, rotting, meat.
It only gets more implausible from there.
The Semantics of Eating Brains
Mathematical models have fun showing how a zombie apocalypse could spread across the globe but leave out almost all of the aspects of a plausible human resistance to it. In short, the zombie apocalypse only comes about because of conveniently placed lynchpins of annihilation. Without a mysteriously bested military, or a vanishing of all the guns and ammunition that litter the United States (a gun for every man, woman, and child, on average), the thinking ape won’t be overcome by the non-thinking, dead version of one.
But while we are speculating, what would be the best zombie weapon? A gun of course. Barring the unexplained plot point of, “We have to save ammo because there isn’t any around,” just hole up at a Wal-Mart. We sadly know how abundant guns are, and just how much ammunition is available.
Many of these points depend on your own interpretation of the canon and the numerous variables involved. I am not saying that every permutation of the now ubiquitous zombie story will end with thawing, rotting meat being exterminated by hungry bears. However, I think it’s useful, if we are to discuss this, to think of real-world implications and at least consider that a future ridden with zombies doesn’t have to end up like I Am Legend, The Walking Dead, or Zombie Land. We could actually win this thing. But I’m still stocking up on machetes just in case those 28 Days Later zombies show up.
Feel free to argue with me in comments, but keep in mind that’s already more than a zombie could do.
This post comes in large part from a discussion I had with manga artist and TED fellow Sara E. Mayhew, who spoke at last summer’s Amaz!ng Meeting.
Further Reading:
How to Control an Army of Zombies—Carl Zimmer
The Walking Dead—Kills, Deaths, and Weapons [Infographic]
Dumb Ways to Die—The Walking Dead Style
Hi Kyle,
I’ve read your post, as I do regularly, and found it very entertaining and instructive as always. I think I was never a big zombie fan, but the Walking Dead series may have changed that a bit. I watch the series religiously (even if it is not that easy here in Portugal) and I think I’ve re-discovered the zombie genera. I’ve seen the remake of Dawn of the Dead by Zack Snyder and enjoyed it tremendously. Having said this, it would have been interesting to read you discussing further arguments against a zombie outbreak. I have a biology background and what is compeling to me is the notion that a deadly virus could in theory go global and have desastrous consequences. I’m not saying that a zombie outbreack could happen, but if you combine a higly contagious (fast mode of transmission – air-born, for example) and deadly virus with apparently unafected and mobile carriers, who can spread the virous at an early stage (as it is the case in the Walking Dead), you have recipy for disaster. In reality, there are no known viruses that combine those features so well. Think of HIV to have an idea of how much harm apparently unaffected carriers can do (in this case, the mode of transmission is among the slowest). And think of Ebola to have an idea how close to an undead you can get, but that leaves you and other infected close to you imobile and very unlikely to spread the virus further (everyone is killed before transmission can be carried further). It is this unlikely combination of virus features that is most compelling to me. Probably the closest we got to that was the influenza epidemic that spread at the end of WWI (think of all those millions that died turned into zombies as well as the millions more who were affected but did not die). On most respects, I agree with you, as is it hard to explain how the military would fall. On the other hand, if you think outside the US I cannot imagine where people would get the guns and ammo to take down the zombies (and ammo does eventually run out). Of course, I’m not arguing for the possibility of a zombie apocalypse, but I think you can carry your arguments further. For example, as a biologist and anthropologist (with several years of forensic experience), what strikes me as most unplausible is the fact that (in the case of the Walking Dead in particular), 1) a corpse, i.e. a dead body, can actually move even if mindless. If you’re dead, all the ATP (adenosine tri phosphate – where cell energy from) in your cells has broken down and your muscles simply don’t have the energy to contract and, hence, you can’t move or walk. So we would have to imagine some sort of energy being delivered directly to these zombies’ cells (eating humans doesn’t work, because if you’re dead you can’t digest). Even if ATP does not break down after death, it runs out pretty fast, so zombies would only have energy only for a few days. The other issue is that 2) zombies also seem to have the capacity of stop decomposition at some point. If you’re dead, your body will break down pretty quickly and I’ll be turned into bones sooner or later. The fact that zombies can survive in a suspended decomposiiton state, also strikes me as a shortcoming of a zombie outbreak that lasts for months or years. In the end, as a biologist/anthropologist what strikes me as most unplausible and unexplained in a zombie outbreak is how they get their energy to wander around, and how they can alt decomposition. Other than that, despite any zombie unplausibility, I’m just glad we can have fun killing them on L4D, Dead Island, Dead Rising, Call of Duty, Dead Space, Half-Life or the recent addicting great Deadlight. Thank you for your post and for having me talk about zombies;)
Best
Hugo
Fun stuff! The only thing scarier than the ZA is when joking about it with friends over drinks and then you realize that someone at the table is taking it MUCH too seriously……
Heh, you think you know someone until they drunkenly divulge their underground bunker full of guns.
I know, right? I mean, where’s the US army? But of course we have to suspend our disbelief, and just enjoy the show.
Oh, if aliens of the Independence Day kind suddenly ” invade” the planet, we’re scr*wed. (6.6)
Cheers !
I’m a big horror fan myself, and the thing I found most ridiculous about zombies taking over the World, the traditional slow ones, is just that. They’d be so easy to manage. Your average day wouldn’t change much, you’d just have to keep some sort of Zombie Dispatching Device in your car like you would an ice-scraper or car-jack.
Mira Grant examines this idea in her ‘Newsflesh’ trilogy. She reworks the ZA into something that’s plausible from a epidemiological standpoint. Good reads
Okay, now there’s something you should hear if you haven’t already; The zombies in 28 Days/Weeks Later weren’t dead, they were infected persons, infected by the rage virus, as most people know when it comes to virus’s you can’t always cure them, you have to fight them out of your body. We already have virus’s that can turn somebody into a crazed state of mind bent on harming anything and anyone in his/her path. I’ll give you an example, Rabies, although rabies, (if untreated) will kill you after 3 days, it can drive a person into a psychotic state, another film that exposes this in a science-fictional way would be Quarantine, and Rec. I’m not certain on this one, but I was told that Mad Cow Disease is very similar with a more cannibalistic approach that comes along with the insanity, I don’t believe corpses can rise from the dead and have one goal: to eat the brains and flesh of the living, it makes little sense, especially since rotting of the flesh will be accelerated by something as simple as a hot summer day, and the bacteria would eat away at it. Also as you’ve stated, our military and police forces would crush the zombie hordes, but maybe, the plan isn’t to destroy the infection but test it; another example of a film would be The Crazies I believe it’s called. In this film people are able to use weapons and have the ability to think, but still want to kill the uninfected survivors, and the government actually had planned this out, once again a realistic approach to an actual zombie apocalypse wouldn’t be rotted corpses, but a virus, one that fucks with the head, and turns a person into a lunatic. Bath salts, another example, what if a new drug was exposed to the public? A pharmaceutical drug let’s say, as a cure to the common cold, it ends up turning people into aggressive killing machines, say a virus blocks a part of the brain out, signals aren’t sent or received to the pain receptors or the athletic part of the brain. Apparently humans only use about 20% of our true strength, shut the part off that controls that, now we have a lunatic bent on killing anyone he sees that can a mile in under a minute, or for ten miles straight at a constant speed that can also knock down a locked door with little issue, that’s the real threat that I can see possibly happening in the future. Anyway, I’m actually looking to write my first novel about a zombie apocalypse, I want to know all the reasons against and all the reasons it’s possible to have a zombie apocalypse to make this story as real as possible, if anybody has any suggestions email me here: superbadkneegrow@gmail.com
Thanks