In these movies, they always show the zombies spreading really fast. If we assume that a) one zombie would bite one person, then take a minute to get a bite to eat, then run to the next person, b) it takes at least 5 minutes for the victim to become a new zombie, and c) two zombies would have 2 victims in 1 minute, etc. wouldn’t the first 24 hours or so of the outbreak be actually really, really slow? Let’s also assume the zombies can’t move very fast because of injuries, and not every victim becomes a new zombie. If we even tried just 200 million people, wouldn’t it take a fairly long time?
Has any zombie fiction ever given a satisfactory explanation why zombies don’t eat other zombies? They are universally shown to eat corpses. What would be a scientific explanation of why a zombie would eat a corpse but not another zombie? World War Z gave a decent explanation, however those zombies did not eat corpses. Technically, if a zombie bites a human, that human is now infected and will become a zombie shortly. Why would the zombie continue to eat the infected human if they won’t eat other zombies?
Scientifically, what would it take to get a dead body to stand up? In most zombie films, they do not bleed like normal humans and they continue to decay. To stand up, I would think they need, at bare minimum, a working nervous system, some circulation, and activity in their brain stem.
What they would need more than anything is a functioning vestibular system in order to remain upright. That means that all of those delicate little tubes and liquids in the inner ear must be perfectly intact and functional, no matter how much the body has rotted or dried up. Which is, of course, impossible.
It’s nanotech gone awry. The zombies don’t need any functioning biological systems because they are infested by nanobots originally intended to help living, normal, injured humans keep fighting while they heal. (This was a military project of course, the nanobots were supposed to help people become supersoldiers.) The nanobots went awry, ended up killing their hosts (making it impossible for them to heal) and yet kept them “functioning” after a fashion.
Why do they eat people? Because the best the nanobots can do with a dead human which they are supposed to keep in “fighting condition” is to activate the zombie’s aggression mechanisms in its brain. The zombie’s mind, such as it is, is pure animalistic hatred of all humans. And the nanotech does everything it can to keep the necessary parts of the brain and body functioning, but doesn’t much care about anything else.
Why not eat zombies? Because the nanobots recognize each other.
In the original 1978 ** Dawn of the Dead **by Romero the point raised in question 2 was specifically addressed:
*** The normal question, the first question is always, are these cannibals? No, they are not cannibals. Cannibalism in the true sense of the word implies an intrapecies activity. These creatures cannot be considered human. They prey on humans. They do not prey on each other - that’s the difference. They attack and they feed only on warm human flesh.***
Nanotech is awesome - it allows writers to write fantasy stories while still maintaining a facade of science fiction.
Quantum Mechanics can also be used for the same purpose. I’ll try to figure out how quantum zombies can work. Maybe, like Schrodinger’s cat, they’re both dead and alive at the same time?
Well, yes. That’s how most outbreaks happen. They start small and then ramp up. You get patient zero who bites someone. Then both of them bite someone. Then the 4 each bite someone. Then the 8 each bite someone…then 16…32…64…128…256…and so on. If you stop it early you are golden…if not you can see how this progression would ramp up pretty quickly. At a certain point you will basically lose control as there will be too many infected and in too diverse a location to properly quarantine.
In most zombie movies and books you don’t usually get someone to turn in a few minutes. That’s the real key to spreading an infectious disease. Your first zombie bites maybe 10 or 15 people. Those people run away scared. Later (hours or days) they turn and then they bite people who do the same thing. Eventually, someone bitten gets on a plane or whatever and spreads the disease all around.
It varies from book to book and movie to movie. In some, the disease is a virus that knows itself and wants to spread…and spreads by having it’s host bite an uninfected human or animal (in some cases). There wouldn’t be a point in biting an infected human since they already have the virus. As to eating, again, it varies…in some zombie books the zombies are actually still alive, so they need to eat if they are going to stay alive. In some it’s just a reflex of what’s left of the brain. Basically, I think it’s in there because the fear of being eaten is pretty universal among humans, so it’s pretty scary. Couple that with the walking dead and that’s why folks who like horror movies like the genre.
The only plausible ones to me are the ones where the zombies are still alive but have something like rabies. The ones where the zombies are actually fully dead just don’t work, scientifically. In some of them they have some bullshit about how the virus halts or slows down decay, and how the virus takes over motor control and such, but if you don’t have a heart pumping, blood flowing and the like it’s just not possible to animate a corpse for any length of time.
Nevertheless, I think most analyses are that a zombie outbreak would be relatively easy to quash once nations were aware of the nature of the threat (which actually would be pretty early on).
Easy to tell a human from a zombie (heck in most of the movies it’s easy to tell a carrier apart too), easy to set up traps to collect/kill zombies and pretty easy to set up safe zones – in the movies, someone has to do something stupid like leave a safe area, or a zombie just jumps out of somewhere and the audience doesn’t stop to think how it was there, waiting so patiently, in the first place.
And it should be possible to wear some kind of hazard suit that makes you safe from attack – it’s hard to contrive a reason why no such suit is possible, yet the zombies never fight amongst themselves.
Still, I enjoy zombie movies. You just have to handwave how we got to the “only handful of survivors remaining” stage.
As I always say… in most cases, if you’ve given 30 seconds thought to any of these questions, that’s 30 seconds MORE thought than the writer(s) gave them!
Just assume it’s the fault of the Army or Big Business. It always is. Just don’t ask yourself why the Army or Big Business thought creating zombies was a great idea.
In the book, the outbreak starts in China and basically spreads rapidly through China’s illegal organ harvesting of condemned criminals. Westerners come into China and pay for a new liver or whatever, and someone infected then goes back to their host country. In addition, as with SARS, the Chinese government (and later the North Korean government) does what it actually does in reality…they try and cover it up until the problem gets so big that they can’t, anymore. So, the initial outbreak isn’t stopped and since it’s all been covered up no one outside of China actually knows what’s going on until the outbreak is full scale. By then it’s too late.
While this scenario has many aspects that are real life (such as how the CCP operates), I think going from a full scale outbreak in China to a global pandemic is still fairly unrealistic. But it’s not the ridiculously implausible fantasy of most of the movies and does have some basis in fact.
Well, there’s different kinds of zombies aren’t there.Shaun of the Dead demonstrates “normal” human movement triggers an aggressive predator response. When a small group of normal folks puts on vacant expressions and effects a shambling gait they just pass on through band of milling zombies. These zombies were frenzy feeding shamblers so if one cornered you and bit you, you could still get away and you’d turn later. But if the pack got you it was feasting time, and not much of a corpse would be left. Zombieland also was not about undead as much as more nimble versions of infected, living humans. They tended to prefer uninfected victims, but they also tended to go solo and maybe they weren’t all that picky. After all, intact humans get tired and scared and are thus easier prey. If a zombie takes on another zombie, it’s a tougher fight.
Then there’s Night of the Living Dead which was actual supernaturally-animated corpses. These are essentially just meat puppets at the telekinetic command of dark magic, the practitioner of which wants to create fear while turning living things into dead things.
Then there’s Serpent and the Rainbow voodoo zombies which are only zombies because they think they are zombies. Seems like they don’t really bother people too much, except inasmuch as they instill a healthy fear of the witch doctor who can desecrate them before and beyond the grave. Skeptics are immune to zombification.
There’s a story of a wise man who did some service for the Emperor of China. In payment, he asked that the Emperor take a chess board, and place a single grain of rice in the first square, two grains in the second, four in the third, eight in the fourth, and so on, and when the last square was filled, he would take all the rice. Thinking that he was getting an amazing deal, the Emperor agreed. Turns out, by the time you get to the 64th square, the wise man was owed more rice than existed in the entire world.
Geometric progression is a bitch. In your scenario, where a zombie can kill a person in five minutes, and that person rises as a zombie so they both kill two people in another five minutes, and they rise as zombies and go and kill four more people, and so on, the six billionth (and final) human would be turned a little under three hours after the epidemic started.
(This, obviously, is assuming that all six billion humans are positioned so that they’re within five minutes shamble of each other, none of the human die before they can be infected, and none of the human successfully fight back and kill any zombies before dying themselves.)
In the real world, there are a number of viruses and fungal infections that have evolved to exert a surprising amount of control over their hosts. Rabies, for example, is spread through saliva. The rabies virus has evolved so that infected mammals develop severe hydrophobia, because drinking water washes the virus-infected saliva out of the victims mouth, making it harder for the virus to be transmitted. And then there’s the so-called “zombie fungus” which infects ants in some tropical rainforests, which forces the ants into some amazingly specific (and deeply creepy) actions in order to help propagate the fungus.
So, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that a zombie virus could evolve that effects its host such that they can distinguish between infected and healthy humans, and drive them to attack only the healthy ones.
This, of course, is where the traditional zombie idea falls apart. Unless you’re talking about something like the Rage virus from 28 Days Later, where the victims aren’t technically dead, there’s really no scientific explanation for a half-rotted corpse still being able to move about.
This is incorrect. No solid explanation for the zombie apocalypse is given in NotLD, but there’s a radio report where a scientist speculates that it was caused when a probe sent to Venus returned to Earth, but exploded in the upper atmosphere.
