Zombies Again! Part 1

I've come to realize something very important, and I feel it should be shared. It's a simple point, but one that is so very often overlooked in this day and age of popcorn-horrors and summer blockbusters. Plainly stated, a zombie apocalypse, as we've seen them portrayed, is impossible.

"But Jesse," you say, "surely someone's put forth a plausible zombie scenario! There have been so many! What about-" and then you can fill in the blank with the apocalypse of your choice. 28 Days Later, World War Z, Dawn of the Dead, whatever. I call shenanigans on all of them, at least the ones I've had the pleasure of being familiar with. And that's a decent number. "But why? What's flawed about their premises?" Well, let me lay it out for you.

First, the "disease" itself. For the purposes of this essay, I'm discounting the magic-based zombies. Let's stay at least somewhat rooted in realism when dealing with our fictions. So that essentially leaves the zombie-plague as a disease, be it engineered by humans, naturally-occurring, or somehow alien. For most zombie situations, they have a couple core principles; either the dead are re-animated and hunger for human flesh, or the living are infected with something that causes them to lose their humanity and become violent, erratic monsters. Okay. For the most part, the disease is spread by the transferral of bodily fluids, such as blood or saliva. Sure. Infection is typically endemic to humans, but that's more a Hollywood necessity (I've already discussed how infected mosquitoes could destroy humanity entirely), but it also makes some sense when you think about how few diseases really affect multiple species (at least in the same way). All of that understood? Wonderful. Makes perfect sense, right?

Well, there are some problems. First off, it's not supremely difficult to keep someone from biting you, especially if you have any clue that they're about to. In this age of the internet, we'd know about the first zombie attacks in America within a matter of hours, so even if enough people are infected quickly to take hold of a small area, you'd have quarantines going up within days. People are notoriously paranoid, too, especially in the post-9/11 era. The outbreak would have difficulty getting going on a wide scale, and even if it did most people have at least a dozen things in their home that could be fashioned into self-defense weapons with the most minimal effort. But let's assume for a moment that everyone is a moron and they swap needles with their local undead.

For a zombie outbreak to really take hold, you're assuming that almost every military force in the world is comprised of under-armed, incompetent, neglectful skeptics, who look at these reports of rampant looting and barbarism as a local issue that happens to be going on everywhere, or something that they simply can't do anything about. After all, that's a civilian eating his grandmother! No honest American boy is going to shoot his neighbor! Some of this can be contributed to the ick factor of seeing zombies doing their business, but that would take hold of most soldiers (bear in mind that we train our armies pretty decently) for maybe fifteen seconds before the lead would start flying. Most outbreaks could be contained, or at least effectively localized and quarantined, in a matter of days, if not weeks. Yes, you'd have a couple hold-outs and isolated incidents, but these would be rare and hardly pandemic-starting. But what if people are idiots and the militaries of the world fail?

In the event of an absolute cock-up of human logic and survival skills, please bear in mind that most of us are separated by vast distances, and, in many cases, nearly-impassable geographical features such as oceans. What this means is that victim #1 is going to have to be pretty darn ingenuitive to get to any other continent than the one he's on. If the infection starts in China, America's got a good chance of surviving. If it starts in America, Europe and Asia and Africa are probably going to be fine. The global pandemic is supremely unlikely unless zombies get really good at flying planes or piloting ocean liners.

So what's my point? Basically, unless a series of absolutely stupid and catastrophic mistakes are made on a global scale (i.e., ignoring the corpses/ crazed cannibals running around destroying things) humanity could handle a zombie apocalypse. At least one like Hollywood keeps showing us.

Tune in next time, when I tell you how I'd set up a (fictional, let's hope!) zombie apocalypse!

DISCLAIMER: I know almost nothing about the Resident Evil movies, and there might be other films I've not heard of. If I'm off on something, or someone has averted these pitfalls, don't hesitate to let me know. I'll check it out!

Gliese 581 is all the proof I need.

Gliese 581 is a red dwarf star in the constellation Libra that's been getting some press lately because a planet was found in the "Goldilocks Zone," a small ring of habitable temperatures where liquid water might be found on solid planets. The star is 20.5 light years away, making it relatively close as far as astronomy goes. A lot of people are claiming this discovery as humanity's next destination, the second earth we've been searching for and dreaming about for years.

Well, I've done some math to figure out exactly how far this planet is, in terms that are more easily understood. Warning: I am not an astronomer or mathematician. These numbers came from sources online, and might not be accurate.

A light-year is a massive distance, we understand that. 20.5 light years, in terms of miles, comes out to around 120,439,334,310,000 miles. That's one-hundred-and-twenty trillion, four-hundred-and-thirty-nine billion, three-hundred-and-thirty-four million, three-hundred-and-ten thousand miles, or 24,641,915,694.5 round trips from New York to Los Angeles. In other words, Gliese 581 is really far away.

Now take into account the speeds of the space shuttle. In orbit, this technological marvel goes a blazing 17580 miles per hour in orbit. Pretty fast, but not nearly fast enough. At that speed, the trip to Gliese 581 would take 781,534 years. That's longer than humans have been throwing pointy sticks at each other by about six hundred millenniums. Now, in theory, we could use the gravity of the sun to slingshot a spacecraft at speeds of about 100,000 miles per hour, though a conventional ship would not survive the g-forces, or be able to escape the sun's gravity well. But, let's say for a second that we achieve that herculean feat. We get a ship going 100,000 miles an hour. We still have to go the 20.5 light years. At that speed, the trip is cut to a much more manageable 137,393.719 years. That's less time than humans have already existed, at least. Only 4580 generations! Unfortunately that's enough that whatever settlers happened to be sent would probably be only mostly-recognizable as humans.

However, all this math and these big bleak numbers prove to me one thing: We need to work on our tech. Humanity is going to need to expand eventually, and we're going to need some serious ships to do so. I'm not naive enough to think that humans will achieve faster-than-light speeds, but we should be able to approach light speed before too terribly long. Hell, if we could get to Gliese in 200 years it would be worth it. If we had a viable chance at making the trip in 1000, I'd sign up. But right now, when you can measure the travel time in thousands of generations, it's not worth speculating. We need to up the ante and make it viable.

That is all.

I guess I'm blogging again.