Resolved: the Zombie Apocalypse Will Happen

Thanks for a well-informed opening argument Con, now I will lay down my case. Preface:The fiction of zombie outbreaks has been present in literature since the 1900’s, and has its roots in Vodou tradition since much earlier years[1]. A zombie outbreak was originally attributed to a supernatural reanimation of recently deceased individuals who can infect other living individuals (usually via. biting). Disease Traits:The most plausible type of vector for which the ‘zombie disease’ can transmit and manifest by is likely a virus. There are many reasons to accept this: 1. We already have great experience in manipulating reteroviral phages to implant the genes of choice, one common example is the treatment of cystic fibrosis [2] 2. Virus’ have exceptionally rapid turnover rates & infectability 3. Because of (2), viruses have the greatest capacity to evolve and adapt to environmental, pharmacological and other pressures Given that we already have very intricate capabilities to build entire genomes from scratch[3], and in the future will have increasing capability to tune & tailor genomes to do virtually anything we want, it is very, very plausible that a virus that animate a diseased individual would be in the pipeline in the near future that would do very much what we would regard as zombification. Evolutionary Drive & Conciousness (Or lack thereof):All organism’s primary drive is to reproduce, and given that some of the deadliest diseases such as HIV & HCV require blood-blood contact or sexual intercourse in order to be transmitted, it is very plausible that a highly infective route, biting, would be a good way to transmit a virus with a large, powerful function of its own. Given that biting is a good route for transmission, we can see that any virus that would control the ‘will’ of an individual to drive them to bite others will be increasingly favoured by natural selection as it would improve its reproduction capabilities. We already have many examples of sub-conscious or minimally-conscious animation states in humans today, such as sleep walking, where an individual would be capable of performing a variety of actions whilst remaining unaware of their doing so. Several ‘murders’ have been overturned because such cases were astonishingly done so while sleepwalking[4]. Even complex actions, such as driving, burying, obtaining of weapons have been reported to occur whilst sleepwalking. Zombie’s Survival Capabilities:It will become quite apparent when reading zombie literature, or watching related movies that zombies are quite durable, this is not by accident. Zombies lack consciousness, and therefore lack the ability to perceive pain, allowing them to continue actions despite suffering injuries that would otherwise completely disable uninfected humans. We already have significant evidence of the performance-enhancing abilities of pain-dulling in the Anglo-Zulu war. Where unarmed Zulu warriors under the influence of muscimol [5] (a hallucinogenic drug) defeated a British army using guns & ammunitions using nothing but hand to hand combat, blades and spears. Moreover, the lack of neural activity would reduce the energy requirements of a human by ~20% [6], and humans are capable of surviving for weeks without food anyway. Summary of a viral zombie outbreak:So, from my above points, a picture of what a viral zombie outbreak would be like would quickly emerge. Minimally conscious or unconscious individuals with an intrinsic drive to biting other individuals would emerge, and after the initial outbreak, natural selection would advantage the individuals with best ability to infect others (presumable with the virus having increased control of the drive of these individuals).These people would be effectively ‘brain dead’, which fits the definition of a deceased individual and for all intents and purposes, zombies. The Impact of a Zombie Outbreak:Remarkably, zombie outbreaks are well-studied computationally and mathematically in the scientific literature. The most comprehensive study was made by Dr. Robert Smith? [7, 8] (yes, question mark is real) who discovered that when modelling a zombie outbreak akin to how a flu infection outbreak, the fact that the diseased also become zombies resulted in an ‘unstable system’, in that the zombies would never achieve equilibrium. Either the outbreak is eliminated completely, or the outbreak will quickly kill/turn all humans into zombies. Reanimation & Lack of Immune Response is the critical difference:The reason why a zombie outbreak would be unstable and would lead to an apocalypse is very subtle, it is the fact that the diseased could also become zombies. Normally in disease, if the disease kills or leads to the death of the individual infected then this would be bad for the reproduction of the pathogen, as it would have less time to transmit itself to other humans, and thus the system reaches an equilibrium. With zombies, this is nowhere near as significant as an issue, as a zombie can reanimate, and also the diseased healthy people are susceptible to zombification. *Adapted from source [8]Normally the death rate, or cure rate would lead to an equilibrium, or tailing of the maximum infectivity of a population. But with a bioengineered virus which effectively animates ‘dead’ individuals they would then have a minimal immunological response. The only non-destructive intervention is a possible cure, which WOULD allow for an equilibrium akin to those seen in other infections. However even assuming one could be rapidly engineered and rushed out (the timescale of the outbreak will likely be too short to do so, as our experience with the H5N1 aka ‘bird flu’ virus has shown) such an outbreak would still be disastrous.From the following graphs from the paper by Dr. Smith? it is plainly seen that without intervention, the zombie virus would rapidly kill/infect all humans. *Taken from source [7]Millitary Intervention:The only way humanity would be able to survive such an outbreak is reported to be rapid, and powerful military intervention, which I argue is unlikely to be organisable under the time scales involved in a typical disease outbreak. But this is likely the only method of the survival of humans so I will spend a bit of time attacking this. Impact on Infrastructure, Fear:Like it or not, the entirety of modern society is built on layer upon layer of technological infrastructures, which range from electrical, food, water production, waste disposal, security, communications etc. All of these infrastructures require people to maintain operations, therefore any outbreak that would affect these infrastructures will be disasterous for society.Moreover, I will argue that the expected human response to a zombie outbreak would actually catalyse the decimation of the human species.First of all, generally infectious diseases are quarantined, and individuals isolate themselves. Our best case studies of this are the black death plague, or smogs [9, 10].I think we can reasonably argue that any disease that results in the animation of infections unconscious individuals would result in mass panic and fear. Panic and fear would paralyze the infrastructures of society, and either cause disorganisation, with the dispersion of the population, or cause organisation of the population, with a milatarized response. However both these responses are lethal.Disorganised Response:With a disorganised response, with the dispersion of the population, then infected individuals would quickly spread from its point of origin, and a military ‘hunt them down’ campaign would be doomed to failure due to the lack of containment and organisation of people.Organised Response:If for example, there was a ‘safehaven’ for uninfected individuals, this would result in the concentration of susceptible individuals into a single place, just a single infection within a densely packed ‘defensive point’, like a siege of a castle, would result in fatal consequences for this cohort. This is a common problem seen in factory farming [11], where an infection of a single animal in a densely packed system would rapidly lead to the infection of all its neighbours.Conclusion:As argued, a zombie outbreak would be disastrous to the human species, and would indeed be an apocalypse. The end of all humans. Be prepared, be afraid.I look forward to Con’s rebuttals, back to Con! References:[1] http://www.livescience.com...[2] http://hmg.oxfordjournals.org...[3] http://www.livescience.com...[4] http://health.usnews.com...[5] http://www.pbs.org...[6] http://www.sharecare.com...[7] http://mysite.science.uottawa.ca...[8] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...[9] http://www.reuters.com...[10] http://history.howstuffworks.com...[11] http://en.wikipedia.org...