Thursday, September 29, 2011

On zombies (again).

Okay...  I haven't covered weaknesses yet, right?  Yep.  So, what is the biggest weakness that zombies have?  Well, they're stupid.  This hypothetical zombie virus would be a lot like rabies in its symptoms, but not in its (Sorry, this bit of the article is under construction as of 06/06/12, 4:36 PM)
  Also, live zombies would die from anything that would normally kill a human.  Still, they would ignore pain and probably survive mortal wounds through sheer not-noticing-they're-supposed-to-be-dead-ness.  That really happens, actually.  Animals with rabies can ignore injury that would kill them if they weren't rabies victims until blood loss or further injury destroys something without which the animal couldn't function.  Regardless, cutting Fred in half might not immediately kill him, but it would sure as hell incapacitate him.  This means that you have a lot more options when you try to kill a zombie.  Shotguns, with their ability to cause massive blood loss in any creature they somehow fail to kill outright, are excellent weapons.  Machine guns are again the boss, even if they are wasteful with ammunition. Grenades own zombie ass.  All sorts of chemicals can kill zombies in seconds.
  Right now, you may be asking yourself "why, if there are so many ways to kill viral zombies, would the zombocalypse ever happen?"  There are a few simple reasons, the first and most sticky being medicine.  No sane government is going to start killing these people if there may be way to cure them.  There might not be a cure for years (or ever), but it doesn't matter.  If the government doesn't try to cure the victims first, the press (problem number two is bad publicity, by the way) will hold a vicious social "trial" in which they will roast the government for "slaughtering" x number of "innocent victims."  Third and perhaps most problematic is time.  In the time it takes to verify that there is no available cure for the virus (or that it won't work on the people who were exposed to the virus more than z hours ago), said virus will spread quickly to a bunch of other countries by people seeking treatment overseas.  On top of that, the problem will worsen drastically in the country or countries in which the virus first turned up.  The army will be deployed eventually, but not nearly in time to stop the virus from spreading.  And so we get a zombie apocalypse.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

On zombies.

Zombies have been described in many ways, but from a logical point of view, a successful zombie is pretty easy to imagine: a fast, live human infected by a virus with an incubation period of two to four weeks.  Fast because an effective vector virus would use its victims' abilities to transmit it to other potential victims, like one of rabies' strains does.  People can run, so why not these zombies?  Corpses don't move all that much either, so obviously you need a live victim.  There are other possible culprits for zombiism (that's now a word), but they all have problems compared to the virus option: parasites are more difficult to transmit, bacteria aren't "smart" enough to rewire your brain, and chemicals just don't do that sort of thing.  Radiation?  No.  Viruses are also pretty good at multiplying, so the onset will be reasonably rapid, but it will take weeks; viruses can explode in population once they've gotten started in the body but they still take time to get up to force, and taking over a brain to any degree isn't a simple job.

All that is kind of obvious.

Antlion.